
Class 


4-0 


Book _ 


■(98-5 


(fywMfN 


CDPXRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 



Books by 
EDITH O'SHAUGHNESSY 

A DIPLOMAT'S WIFE IN MEXICO. 

Illustrated. 

DIPLOMATIC DAYS. Illustrated. 



HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK 
[Established 1817] 




DUCAL PALACE, NANCY 



MY LORRAINE 
JOURNAL 



by 
EDITH O'SHAUGHNESSY 

[MRS. NELSON o'sHAUGHNESSYJ 

AUTHOR OF 

"A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico" 
and "Diplomatic Days" 



ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER' y BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



AU&-27 !3!8 



My Lorraine Journal 



Copyright, 1018, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published September, 1918 

e-s 



©CI.A501580 



To 
Mrs. William H. Crocker 

In memory of a lost battle 

and in appreciation of 

her work in Lorraine 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Ducal Palace, Nancy Frontispiece 

Verdun and Vicinity Facing p. 4 

Place Stanislas, Nancy " 12 

Author at Vitrimont " 30 

Cemetery, Vitrimont " 30 

The Bridge at Luneville " 30 

Fountain of Amphitrite by Jean Lamour, Place Stanis- 
las, Nancy " 38 

Souvenir Menu of Luncheon at Verdun, June 17, 1917 " 46 

Our Party on the Battle-field at Verdun, June 17, 1917 ' ' 50 

In the Boyaux, Verdun, June 17, 191 7 " 50 

Sister Julie " 124 

Bas-relief of the Refugees " 124 

Miss Polk's Wedding " 162 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Foreword xi 



PART I 

CHAP. 

I. How One May Happen to Go to the Front .... 3 

II. Nancy 12 

III. Luneville 18 

IV. VlTRIMONT 22 

V. Luneville Again 28 

VI. Gerbeviller and La Sceur Julie 33 

VII. Bar-le-Duc 37 

VIII. Verdun 4 2 

IX. ChAlons. — Chateau de Jean d'Heurs. — Revigny, the 

"Lining" of the Front 60 

X. Mont Frenet. — La Champagne Pouilleuse. — The Re- 

turn 64 

PART II 

I. By the Marne 77 

II. The Canteen at Bar-le-Duc 87 

III. Theatricals and Camouflage 97 

IV. The Burial of Pere Cafard 108 

V. A Providential Ford 112 

v 



CONTENTS 

PART III 

LORRAINE IN AUTUMN 
"L' elegante et nuiancolique Lorraine" 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Nancy and Molitor 121 

II. Eighteenth-century Emanations 131 

III. Toul 144 

IV. A Stroll in Nancy 153 

V. Vitrimont in Autumn 161 

VI. At the Guerins' 167 

VII. Across Lorraine 174 

VIII. The Chalons Canteen 182 



FOREWORD 

It will be seen, by the first chapter, how fortuitous 
though inevitable was the writing of this little book, 
begun before the American troops came to France; yet 
it happens to concern that part of the war zone wherein 
our men are preparing themselves for battle, and which 
will be quickened with their blood. 

The time has scarcely come to write of the world war ; 
indeed, it is only between wars that one can write of 
them, when wisdom, with accompanying imagination, 
looks down the great perspectives; now men's utmost 
energies are concentrated upon deeds of passion per- 
formed in hope or in despair. 

Oliver's Ordeal by Battle of 191 5 remains the most 
scholarly and philosophic of the war books; Masefield's 
Gallipoli the most artistic. But even these, and the 
many, many others, give not so much a sense of in- 
adequacy as of impossibility. 

Letters from strong souls undergoing supreme emo- 
tions have emanated from the trenches or the air. We 
have mourned young perished singers : Rupert Brooke, 
Alan Seeger. But for the most part, and so it must be, 
war books are limited to the relation of personal deeds 
and sufferings, and descriptions of localities where they 
have taken place, colored more or less by the tempera- 
ment of each — even as I, li en passant par la Lorraine," 
wrote these pages. 

Edith Coues O'Shaughnessy. 

33 RUE DE l'UniVERSITE, PARIS, 

January 19, 19 18. 



PART I 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

CHAPTER I 

HOW ONE MAY HAPPEN TO GO TO THE FRONT 

Paris, Thursday, June 7, 1917. 

EVEN personal events have their outriders, and this 
is how an unexpectant lady, still fiancee to Mexico, 
received from Destiny various indications that she was 
to go there where men, ten thousand upon ten thousand, 
lay down their lives pro patria. Like everything, it was 
simple when it had happened. 

At the Foire Saint-Sulpice, where I was serving at the 
tea-stall, I met E. M. C, whom I thought in California. 
After greetings (we had not seen each other since the 
fatal month of October, 1916) she said to me: 

"You must come down to Luneville where I have a 
house, and visit the village of Vitrimont, that mother is 
rebuilding." 

I answered: "My dear, I'm still tied to Mexico, and 
I can see my publishers frowning all the way across the 
ocean if the second much-promised, long-delayed book 
doesn't arrive. I oughtn't even to peep at anything else 
for the moment." 

Then, tea victims beginning to crowd in, "business as 
usual" engaged us and we parted. 

When I got home I found that Joseph Reinach, met 

3 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

but once — Polybe of the delightful Commentaires — had 
sent me his brochure, Le Village Reconstitue. I still 
didn't hear the outriders galloping down the street. 

In the evening I dined chez Laurent with Mr. C, 
known in Mexico. When I got there I found that his 
sister, Madame Saint-R. T., Presidente de La Renais- 
sance des Foyers, was going into Lorraine, to Luneville 
itself, the next day ; conversation was almost entirely of 
the practical work to be done in the devastated districts, 
and the deeply engaging philosophie de la guerre, of how 
one had not only to rebuild villages, but to remake souls 
and lives. 

A quoi bon donner des chemises? Give tools and im- 
plements, or a brace of rabbits, that nature may take 
its course and the peasant can say, "Soon I will have a 
dozen rabbits, and twenty-five francs that I have 
earned." 

Some one observed that it really would be the rab- 
bits, however — it is any living, productive thing that is 
of account, beyond all else, in the dead and silent places 
of devastation, and gifts of twelve chickens and one 
cock are demanded rather even than shoes. 

As we were pleasantly dining in the garden, and 
philosophizing sometimes with tears, sometimes smiles, 
a terrific thunder-storm broke over Paris, and we all 
crowded into the big central room, with piles of hastily 
torn-off, muddy table-linen. We sat talking, however, 
till they turned both ourselves and the lights out. As 
we parted, Madame Saint-R. TVs last words were, 
"But try to come down to Luneville." 

I thought to myself that night, "Things are getting 
hot." I believe in signs from heaven, and signs from 
heaven are not to be neglected. 

On Saturday, when E. M. stopped by for me to go 
again to the Foire, I said: 

4 



TO THE FRONT 

"I believe I will go to Luneville. What does one do 
about papers?" 

We straightway went to the Rue Francois Premier, 
not being in the manana class, either of us, and found 
there a charming specimen of jeunesse doree, intellectual, 
"sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," but do- 
ing his bit. Shears for the cutting of red tape were 
liberally applied, and my papers were promised in an 
unprecedented three days. 

As we "swept" out I said to E. M., "You don't 
think we were too strenuous?" 

She said, "Oh, they are used to us now, though it was 
a thrilling moment when you ripped your photograph 
(such a photograph!) from the duplicate of your pass- 
port!" 

The aforementioned charming specimen, M. de P., 
had said a photograph was essential; it was Saturday 
afternoon, the next day was Sunday, and for some unex- 
plained reason photographers don't seem to work in 
France on Mondays, at least not in war-time. 

It was about this time that E. M. said, in a d£gag6 
way : "I am going down to Verdun with a friend. It's 
awfully difficult, and the women who have been there 
can be counted on one's fingers. I wish you could go, 
too." 

I said, "That's out of the question." But I thought 
to myself, "We will see what Fate decides." It's a great 
thing to keep astride of her, anyway. 

On account of Sunday coming in between, my papers 
could not be ready in time for me to leave with her on 
Tuesday (they have to be sent to the Quartier -General 
to be stamped), but they were promised for Wednesday 
that I might start for Luneville on Thursday. I went 
to see E. M. at her aunt's, the Princess P.'s, on Mon- 
day night for a few last words and injunctions. I found 
2 5 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

her after passing through some lovely dove-gray rooms 
with priceless old portraits of Polish great, hanging on 
silvery walls, and rare bibelots and porcelains discreetly 
scattered on charming tables rising from gray carpetings. 
She greeted me by saying, "It's all arranged for you to 
go to Verdun, too." 

"Verdun!" I cried. "Glory and sorrow of France!" 
I didn't ask how, but thought of the harmonious 
working of chance that brings as many gifts as blows 
in its train. 

Thursday, June 14th, 10.30 a.m. 

We slipped out of the station, flooded with waves of 
blue-clad men, at eight o'clock, and since then there 
has been a constant stopping of the train in green, glade- 
like places to let troop-trains pass. A while ago I found 
myself looking out on a river, and a shiver went over 
me. It was the jade-colored, slow-flowing Marne. 

White morning-glories are thick on every hedge, and 
wild roses such as grow in New England lanes, and there 
are many thistles, soft and magenta-colored; lindens, 
acacias, and poplars abound and hang delicately over 
the banks of the river. 

Lying open on my lap is the Revue de Paris of June 
1st, but I can't read even the beautiful "Lettres d'un 
Officier Italien" — (Giosue Borsi 1 ), breathing a deep 
spirit of conformity to the will of God and showing the 
evolution that many an intellectuel catholique of his 
generation has gone through in Italy. In his dug-out 
were Dante, Homer, Ariosto, the Gospels, St. Augustine, 
Pascal, and Le Manuel du Parfait Caporal et les Secours 
d' Urgence. And he loved his mother and let her know it. 

All along the route are villages and peaceful country 
houses, near the train, bowered in acacia and linden; 

1 Killed 10th November, 191 5, at Zagora, at the head of his battalion. 

6 



TO THE FRONT 

elder-bushes are in full bloom, too, and we pass many 
green kitchen gardens. Women are shaking blankets 
out of windows, and looking at the train going to the 
front, thinking, who shall say what thoughts? 

Later. 

Big movement of troops is delaying us, and it has been 
a morning spent among emerald-green hills, pale, like 
Guatemalan or Bolivian emeralds, not like the deep- 
colored gems of the Rue de la Paix. Everywhere are 
patches of blue-clad men, marching down white roads 
between green fields melting into the blue sky at the 
point of the eyes' vision. Still others are bathing in the 
pale, warm Marne or resting on its banks. Trains go 
past loaded with battered autos, camions and guns 
coming from the front, or others with neatly covered, 
newly repaired machines of death, going out. 

All were silent in the train at first. " Mefisz-vous, les 
oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent" is the device placarded 
everywhere. In my coupe some one feeling slightly, 
very slightly, facetious, had rubbed out the first two 
letters of oreilles, changed the first "e" into an "/," so 
that it read, "Mefiez-vous, les filles ennemies vous ecou- 
tent." The ruling passion strong in death! 

We pass Epernay, whose little vine-planted hills had 
run red, before the treading out of its 19 14 wine, with the 
blood of English and French heroes. 

At last we began to talk, a dark-eyed colonel of in- 
fantry with the Grand' Croix de la Legion d'Honneur 
having reached down my bag for me. 

It is a historic date for France and for ourselves. 

The night before, General Pershing arrived in Paris, 
with his guerdon of help, mayhap salvation. All the 
newspapers had pictures of him and his staff, their 
reception at the station, the crowd before the H6tel 

7 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Crillon. One officer told the story of the woman in the 
crowd who was so little that there wasn't the slightest 
chance of her seeing anything or anybody. When asked 
why she was there she answered, "Mais j'aurai assiste," 
and that, it seems to me, is the epitome and epitaph of 
the generation whose fate it is to see with their eyes 
the world war. 

In the Station, ChAlons-sur-Marne, 2.30 p.m. 

Extreme heat. Train four hours late on account of 
the movement of troops. Wave after wave of horizon 
blue undulates through the station. They are lying 
about, standing about, sitting about — the poilus. Half 
hidden by their equipment, their countless bundles tied 
around their waists, slung on their shoulders, under their 
arms, they seem indescribably weary and dusty, turned 
toward the blazing front where the best they can hope is 
la bonne blessure — theirs not to reason why. Sometimes 
30,000 pass through Chalons in a day. 

Now it comes to me that our men — our fresh, eager, 
beautiful young men, such as I saw disembark at Vera 
Cruz — will pass through this same station to that same 
blazing front. . . . 

By my window, on the siding, is passing an endless 
train of box-cars, with four horses in the ends of each 
car. Between the horses' forefeet, pale-blue groups of 
men are crowded; no room to lie, scarcely to sit — 
cramped, hot, with their eternal accoutrement. One 
bent group was playing cards, the horses' heads above 
them. But mostly they are looking out at people who 
are not called upon to die. 

Later. 

Pangs of hunger began to assail me as the train pulled 
out. I went into the dining-car and had a modest, 

8 



TO THE FRONT 

belated repast of ceujs sur le plat, cheese and fruit. 
At the tables were groups of uniformed men talking in 
low voices of what had been and what might have been. 
As I looked out of the window, while waiting, my eyes 
fell upon the first band of prisoners I had seen — tall, 
stalwart men, wearing the round white cap with its 
band of red — at work on the roads, those veins and ar- 
teries of France. 

An officer, once the most civilian of civilians, look- 
ing like the pictures of Alexandre Dumas fits on the 
covers of cheap editions of La Dame aux Camelias, with 
bushy hair parted on one side, mustache, and stubby 
Napoleon, broad face and twinkling eyes, pointed out 
Sermaize, the first of the devastated villages we passed, 
which has been rebuilt by the English Society of Friends. 
"Conscientious objectors" don't intend to let the sons 
of Mars do everything, but they can't keep pace with 
the destruction. In Le Village Reconstitue M. Reinach 
speaks of the ugliness of the models proposed to the 
victims, which pass understanding, and says that even 
the vocabulary of Huysmans would not suffice to give 
the least idea of them. What the peasant wants is 
,l mon village," which doesn't at all resemble what the 
commis voyageur en laideur proposes. 

Revigny, 4.30 p.m. 

I have seen the first black crosses in a green field 
bounded by clumps of poplar against the clear sky. 
Revigny is a mass of ruins, roofless houses, heaps of mor- 
tar, and endless quantities of blue-clad, heavily laden 
men coming and going in the station — the eternal wait- 
ing, waiting for transit. Revigny is on the road to 
Verdun, Alexandre Dumas fils told me. He gets out at 
Bar-le-Duc, which is now the point of departure to the 
fateful fortress. Groups of yellow Annamites are work- 

9 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

ing at the roads. They are imported for that purpose, 
being of little use when the cannon sounds. 

Awhile ago two young Breton under-officers, colonials, 
came into the compartment. They had been at school 
together and had not met for ten years until just now 
on the train. They watched together the shifting scen- 
ery; one was coming from a young wife, the other from 
a fiancee. 

GONDRECOURT. 

Two symmetrical fifteenth-century towers pierce a 
pale-blue sky. One of the young Bretons tells me that 
for some time the train has been making a great detour, 
as the straight line to Nancy would take it through 
Commercy, daily bombarded by the enemy. 

Pagny, 5.30 o'clock p.m. 
Here we pick up the Meuse — and there still follows 
us the pink-and-gray ribbon of willow-fringed canal that 
links the Marne to the Rhine, and which all day long 
has looked like the marble the Italians call cipollino. 
But I remember that its greenness has been but lately 
colored with a crimson dye. 

Toul {where we thread up the Moselle), 5.50. 

We have just passed Toul. Great barracks are near 
the station, and on the opposite hill is the fortress, high 
against the sky, bound to Verdun by an uninterrupted 
series of forts. It is a place de guerre de premidre classe. 
The Romans had an encampment here, and Vauban 
made the fortifications of his time. 

And because the mind is not always held to the 
thing in view, even though it be of great moment, I 
thought how Toul was the town where Hilaire Belloc 
did his military service, "was in arms for his sins"; 
from here it was that he set out upon the "path to 

10 



TO THE FRONT 

Rome" in fulfilment of his vow. Other things laid long 
away in memory came to mind, and I was only jerked 
back as my eye was caught by a group of German 
prisoners being marched past the station, one soldier, 
with a pointed bayonet, in front of them and another 
behind. 
And at Nancy we are to knit up the river Meurthe. 



CHAPTER II 

NANCY 

NANCY, a dream of the eighteenth century, with the 
reveille of twentieth-century guns. 

We arrived at Nancy five hours late, at seven o'clock. 

No sign of E. M., no sign of anything familiar. For- 
tunately I was flanked by Brittany, and a stout heart 
did the rest. When we found that the next train for 
Luneville would leave at nine o'clock, I asked them to 
dine with me and take a little walk about the town. 
Our luggage — we were all traveling light, I with a hand- 
bag and flat straw valise, they with two iron helmets — 
was given to the consigne and, after my sauf-conduit had 
been stamped in three separate places, we departed. 

The square before the station was surging with the 
usual pale-blue waves, and as we crossed it the odor 
of leather and tired feet and hot men was a good deal 
stronger than the linden scent. We passed a very banal 
statue of Thiers, Liberateur du Territoire, and some hor- 
rors of art nouveau. A construction with colored-glass 
windows and unnatural cupolas and gilding and mushy 
outlines protruded from a corner, and its name, for its 
sins, was Hotel Excelsior. But we were searching for 
the celebrated Place Stanislas. After asking a passer- 
by, we were directed to a street whose name I have for- 
gotten, and we started down its rather distinguished 
length of gray, well-built houses of another century, 

12 



NANCY 

many of them having the double Lorraine cross in red 
to indicate cellar accommodations, with the number they 
could shelter. 

When, suddenly, we stepped into the Place Stanislas, 
I almost swooned with joy. I was in full eighteenth 
century, in the midst of one of its most perfect creations, 
with the low boom of the twentieth-century guns in the 
distance. 

Quickly my spirit was ravished from the world of 
combat into the still, calm, beautiful world of art, with- 
in the enchantments of the grilles of Jean Lamour. A 
sensation sweet, satisfying, unfelt since the beginning of 
the war, invaded me. I gazed entranced upon that deli- 
cate tracery of wrought iron, like some rich guipure, at the 
four corners of the square of buildings, its lovely gilding 
reflecting a soft light; and, outlined against a heaven 
colored especially for them — pale blue, with threads of 
palest pink, and a hint of gray and yellow — were urns 
and torches and figures, half human, half divine, sup- 
porting them. The beautiful fountains in the corners 
were banked with sand-bags, but their contours were in 
harmony with the other grilles, and one was surmounted 
by an Amphitrite, the other by a Neptune. It was all 
a symbol of a state of mind, a flowering of feeling, to 
which had been vouchsafed a perfection of expression. 

There is an Arc de Triomphe, put up by Stanislas at 
one end, in honor of his kingly son-in-law, in front of 
the Hotel de Ville, and a statue of Stanislas himself in 
the middle, bearing the name "Stanislas," the date 
of 1 83 1, and "La Lorraine Reconnaissante ." In looking 
about, my eye fell on the Restaurant Stanislas, dans la 
note, certainly, and I decided to dine there. We found 
that we had time to investigate a little further, and 
turned down by the cafe into a most lovely linden- 
scented square called Place de la Carriere. Through the 

1 3 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

double lines of trees between the fountains at the farther 
end was visible an old palace, and the square was flanked 
by houses that courtiers only could have lived in. It 
all cried out, "Stay with me awhile." An old park was 
at one side, with trees planted en quinconce 1 — chest- 
nuts, ash, trembling poplars — and everywhere was the 
penetrating fragrance of the lindens. It was so sweet 
and loosening under the shade, after the long hot day 
in the train, that the young officers began to talk, one 
of his fiancee waiting in Les Landes, the other of his 
wife of a year, seen only twice seven days. And then 
again we were silent, and under the flowering trees I 
was seized with a great longing for the beautiful and 
calm, for the arts and ways of Peace. It seemed to me 
I could not longer think of this, that, or the other "offen- 
sive," but that I must see before my eyes, hear with 
my ears, feel with my touch, the lovely, the melodic, 
the benign. bon Jesus! Not of the battle-fields, not 
of reformes, of limbless, sightless men, not of starving, 
frightened children, not of black-robed women, not of 
lonely deaths, not of munition-factories. What is this 
world we are in? 

I don't know how long we were silent, but at last one 
of the young men said, "We must think of the hour." 
Then came a glancing at wrist watches, rattling of 
identity disks, and we went back to the cafe and got a 
table by the window, where we could look out on the 
lovely, calm ensemble and the fading sky. The menu 
was brought; it was a meatless day, but with a snap of 
the eye the waiter recommended ceufs a la geUe. We 
understood later, when we found, concealed jn the bot- 
tom of each little dish under the egg, a thick, round 
piece of ham. Fried perch, new potatoes, salad, straw- 
berries and cream, with the celebrated macarons of 

1 Planted so that any vista represents the Roman numeral V. 



NANCY 

Nancy — des Sceurs Macarons, as the little piece of paper 
underneath each says — made a delicious menu. A cer- 
tain petit vin gris du pays had been recommended us 
with another snap of the eye. 

As we sat waiting, one of the officers exclaimed at a 
giant, lonely, priestly figure passing through the Place: 

11 Le voila, Vaumdnier du 52^." 

I said, "Do run after him and ask him for dinner, 
too." 

He came back with the young man and we had a 
most enjoyable repast. The chaplain knew all the 
things about Nancy that we didn't. He was a huge, 
bearded man, who might have been with the hosts of 
Charlemagne, and was a native of Commercy, where 
Stanislas used to go with his court. The two Bretons 
were very Catholic and very royalist; when I remarked 
upon it, they said, simply, "Oh, we are all that way, par 
Id," and they spoke names of great men born in Brittany, 
and the aumtn'er told tales of near yesterdays surpassing 
those of the heroic age. The gayest of the Bretons, he who 
had not just left his young wife and his child unborn, 
began to sing, "Voici un sone tout nouveau," and sud- 
denly it was a quarter before nine and we had time only 
for a dash to the station d'une bonne allure militaire, 
which left me breathless. The nine-o'clock train didn't, 
however, leave till ten, as it was waiting for the Paris 
train, which didn't arrive at all. Finally, in a strange 
heat, vagaries of lightning without thunder or rain — 
the thunder we did hear wasn't the old-time, pleasant, 
celestial sort, but something with an easily traceable, 
regular, decisive sound — we pulled out of the station, 
I not knowing where I was going — no address in the 
town of Luneville. 

A thick, heavy, soft, enveloping night was about us. 

Groups of soldiers were lying, sitting, standing in the 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

little stations. We stopped every few minutes, and I 
could distinguish them by the light of cigarette or 
lantern on their guns and equipment, waiting for motors 
to take them to the trenches. At one place I had to 
descend to show my sauj -conduit; it was inspected and 
stamped by the nickering light of a blue-veiled lantern, 
and I climbed in again. I was beginning to feel a bit 
tired, and the end was not in sight. 

We descended at Luneville in complete darkness, a 
motley crowd of military and civilians. My com- 
panions were due at different points at dawn — Baccarat 
and the Forest of Parroy. As I write, they are in the 
trenches. They put me into the hands of a commissaire 
who said he lived opposite E. M.'s. I waited, standing 
by the door, while he locked up the station, looking 
out on the silhouette of a gutted, roofless house, showing 
dimly against the soft night sky. At last there was a 
sound of rattling of keys and the commissaire picked me 
and my luggage up. We started forth, the only human 
beings visible, in what seemed a deserted town — no 
lights in streets or houses. 

As we passed a wide open space the scent of flowering 
lindens enveloped me, and with me walked the ghosts 
of lovely and too-amiable ladies, of witty rulers loving 
the arts as well as women — Duke Leopold and Madame 
de Craon, King Stanislas and Madame de Boufflers, and 
Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet. 

We walked seemingly through the entire town toward 
a freshness of parks, and in darkness we arrived before 
a garden gate; silence, and the bell nowhere to be 
found. After looking for it in the light of various 
matches — vainly, of course — the commissaire had the 
brilliant idea of going to the house next door, la maison 
de M. le Maire, the celebrated M. Keller. A woman 
came out and showed the bell where nobody would ever 

16 



NANCY 

have thought of looking for it, and, furthermore, masked 
by vines. The door was finally opened by a tall, slender, 
white-robed figure with two black braids showing over 
her shoulders and a floating scarf. I thought it a vision 
of Isolde, but it proved to be Miss P., who cried: 

"We had given you up! We waited at Nancy till 
the train came in, and then had to motor back as quickly 
as possible on account of the lights." 

I went in, to find E. M. in a most becoming, slinky, 
pale-blue satin neglige", also with braids on her shoulders. 
I'd rather have found them both in paniers, shaking the 
powder out of their hair. However, I can't complain; 
it was all pretty good as regards the stage-setting. We 
embraced. I explained that various zealous guardians 
of the gates of Nancy had stamped my sauf-conduit, 
and, as I was certainly the only one of my species arriv- 
ing by that train, they should have given news of me 
when asked concerning une Americaine. Then, as the 
only healthy rooms in Luneville in 191 7 are on the 
ground floor, I departed to one that had been retained 
for me at the Hotel des Vosges. Again through the 
soft-scented night, guided by my commissaire, to a room 
of extreme cleanliness and a most comfortable bed. 

It is 2 a.m. I am too tired to sleep. My mind is 
jacked up. by all the twists and turns of the day. I 
have been reading the Cour de Luneville, by Gaston 
Maugras, found in my room, belonging to E. M. 

Three o'clock. Soft, very soft booming of cannon, 
and a deep-toned bell. But no "poppy throws around 
my bed its lulling charities." 



CHAPTER III 

LUNEVILLE 

IUN^VILLE, a dream of fair women of old and new 
-* times, linden scents, and circling Taubes and little 
white puffs of shrapnel against blue skies. 

Hotel des Vosges, June 15th, 8 a.m. 

Have just breakfasted to the gentle accompaniment 
of firing on a Taube. 

Dear old village life began at an early hour, but of 
course the Taube put the cocks and the carts and the 
geese and all the other usual auroral sounds quite in 
the background. 

My breakfast service is decorated with the same 
double cross of Lorraine that I saw on various houses 
in Nancy indicating comfortable cellar accommodation. 
The cross with the chardon lorrain (Lorraine thistle) is 
everywhere. 

Popping and cannonading going on at a lively rate, 
and whir of aero wheels; a beautiful day. Some little 
white puffs of shrapnel visible from my window; I 
must get dressed and investigate. 

Cannonading just stopped. I don't know whether he 
got off or was got. 

The hotel is discreet and clean, avec un petit air. 

It has been a good house of the good epoch, and over 

18 



lun£ville 

each window are diverse and charming eighteenth- 
century motifs in gray stone. 



6.30 p.m. 

Just home from Vitrimont in a blinding blaze of 
sun, in a motor driven by E. M., and bearing in 
large letters the words ' ' Commission Calif ornienne pour 
la Reconstruction des Villages Devastes," a sort of 
"open sesame," and everywhere bayonets were lowered 
to let us pass. Nerves a-quiver with another day's im- 
pressions. Tried lying down, but it didn't go, so I am 
in an arm-chair looking out of my Lorraine window in 
full eighteenth century as regards setting, but with a 
very definite tide of twentieth-century warfare sweeping 
through it all. Meant to go to church, where there 
are special prayers to be offered up, at Benediction, for 
the needs of Lorraine, but, though the spirit was willing, 
the rest of me was like lead after the hot, full day and 
two hours in one spot too tempting. 

This morning, before I was dressed, E. M. and 
Mrs. C. P., also staying in the hotel, appeared, so I 
hastily harnessed up for the day and sallied forth with 
them. We went first to the charming old house of 
Mile. Guerin, and, going in through a wide hallway, 
stepped out into a large garden, where, under some 
trees, several ladies were sitting, one of them Madame 
Saint-R. T. We embraced cordially, in the very evi- 
dent fulfilment of destiny. Madame Saint-R. T. was 
reading Pierre Boye's Cour de Luneville, which I matched 
with Gaston Maugras's, and then I looked about me. 

The house, gray and long and low, was, until a hun- 
dred years ago, a Capuchin monastery, when it came 
into the hands of Mile. Guerin's family. There are old 
linden- trees in the garden, and some tall cedars and 

19 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

roses not doing very well, and masses of canterbury- 
bells and geraniums. At one end of the garden, against 
the wall, is an ancient statue of the Virgin, dark, moss- 
grown, against still darker walls; we placed the flowers 
we had gathered on her breast and in the hands of the 
Child. Avions were humming above in the perfect sky, 
and against the faultless blue was a very white crescent 
moon just discernible. 

After accepting an invitation for dinner that night, 
we walked out through the town toward the Chateau, 
once the haunt of witty rulers, philosophers, and of the 
fair and evidently too-amiable ladies beloved by them. 
However, when we got into the great square of the 
palace I forgot about them, for, looking up at the statue 
of Lasalle, born in Metz, 1775, and fallen at the battle 
of Wagram, 1807, were two Senegalese whom we looked 
at as the Luneville populace might once have looked at 
the camels the young Duke Leopold brought back with 
him from his wars with the Turks. The juxtaposi- 
tion was as strange. One of the Senegalese had on a 
blue cap, the other a red. We gave each one a franc 
for cigarettes, received large-mouthed, white-toothed 
smiles, and proceeded to look at the remains of a German 
avion which had fallen beside the statue the day before, 
the most complete wreck possible. The aviator had 
been killed and his broken wings were being removed to 
the Museum. It made me quite still — there was some- 
thing so complete about it all, the great Chateau in the 
background, the statue of Lasalle, the two Senegalese, 
the shattered Taube! 

We walked on rather quietly over the bridge of the 
Vesouze to the Place des Carmes — the Place Brulee, as 
it is now called. The big Carmelite convent which 
formed the square had been used as a barracks for a 
generation or so, and one side had been burned with 

20 



LUNfiVILLE 

incendiary bombs when the Germans left, while the 
other side was untouched. In the middle was the statue 
of L'Abbe Gregoire (who made the mistake of being 
ahead of his time), and on the pedestal are the words, 
"J'ai v£cu sans l&cheti, je veux mourir sans remords." 
We stopped only a moment at the church — eighteenth 
century, of course; fine old choir, delicate baroque de- 
signs on the great wooden doors, and dominating towers 
in a lovely reddish stone, with charming motifs of urn 
and scroll, and flying angels against the sky, or rather 
in it. 

We began to have that "gone" feeling about this 
time, and turned back through the town to E. M.'s 
house, where we were to lunch. It was cool and charm- 
ing as we stepped in out of the sun-flooded garden, 
stripped of the mystery of the night before, but quite 
lovely. In old Luneville china vases were masses of 
pink and purple canterbury-bells. It had been hastily 
but charmingly got ready for occupancy with old fur- 
niture that nice people in the provinces can put at the 
disposition of their friends, and I saw again Miss P., 
the Isolde of the dim, scented garden of the night 
before. After lunch we sat in an arbor jutting into a 
corner of the ancient park, drinking our coffee, and 
eating some Mirror candies just out from New York — 
all to the continued hum of avions and the rather soft 
crack of guns. Then the motor was announced, or, 
to be faithful to reality, somebody said, "We'd better 
be off." We put on our veils, got into the motor, which 
E. M. cranked herself, and started off to Vitrimont with- 
out any male assistance of any kind. 

3 



CHAPTER IV 

VITRIMONT 

A MERCILESS blaze of sun as we passed out through 
the town, badly battered at the end, through the 
Place Brulee, leading to the road to Vitrimont, some 
three kilometers distant, running through green fields 
with their little groups of black crosses. All is softly 
green and gently rolling. Vitrimont, and around about 
it, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of that 
first August of the war, and Vitrimont itself was taken 
and lost at the point of the bayonet seven times in one 
day as gray German floods kept rolling in over the green 
eastern hills. The village is charmingly placed on a lit- 
tle eminence; sloping down from it are very fertile 
meadows, then other thickly wooded hills slope up 
against the sky. 

We passed through encumbered streets of devastated, 
roofless houses, going first to Miss P.'s little dwelling, 
that she has lived in during all these months of the 
superintending of the reconstruction work. It consists 
mostly of one perfectly charming room done up in yel- 
low chintz with a square pattern of pink roses, and 
some good bits of old furniture, books, and flowers. 
She took down from the wall a violin made by a con- 
valescing soldier out of a cigar-box and drew from it a 
few soft and lovely tones. The rest of the house, where 
she has installed herself with a woman servant, is 

22 



VITRIMONT 

typical of the Lorraine peasant houses: a very wide 
door to let the harvest-wagons in, a narrow one for hu- 
man beings, a narrow hall leading into a kitchen, then 
the bigger living-room giving into it, now so charming 
in its yellow chintz. From the kitchen some steep stairs 
lead up into an attic which Miss P. has converted into 
a medical dispensary. 

Outside, across the street, is a little pergola effect 
made of boarding, where one can sit and look out across 
the softly rolling, wooded hills. In it are a table and a 
few chairs and some pots of flowers. We deposited our 
tea-things there, and were starting out to make the 
tour of the village, when the mayor, in shirt sleeves, 
loose suspenders, and slipping trousers (his wife was 
killed in the 191 5 bombardment of Luneville and his 
son fell in the 19 14 fighting in Vitrimont), came to wel- 
come us and do the inevitable stamping of our safe- 
conducts. 

We then proceeded to the old church, one of the first 
things to be restored, so that its delicious fifteenth- 
century vaultings and window-tracings would be beyond 
further damage from exposure to the weather. One of 
the things not hurt was the dado running around the 
interior in the form of painted cloth folds by a mis- 
guided nineteenth-century cure. War, with its usual 
discriminating touch, had left that. In the vestibule 
are some small, perfect Louis XV holy- water fonts in 
the form of shells upheld on angels' heads. A cele- 
brated baptismal font was removed to Paris. 

We then went to the maison forte, as the peasants 
call what had been a sort of chateau, the dwelling of the 
"first family" of the place. Its medieval tower was 
battered beyond repair, and the house itself pretty well 
damaged, while some of the rooms still had charming 
bits of paneling, and the locks and latches of the doors 

23 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

were perfect examples of eighteenth-century wrought- 
iron work. In one of the large rooms, whose ceiling was 
broken in by a shell, was a lovely old fireback under a 
marble mantel with the arms of the Counts of Vitri- 
mont. By a north window was sitting a woman 
working at an embroidery screen with a brilliant 
green and silver design; an old man with palsied head 
was near. 

The school also has been rebuilt. A rosy-faced young 
schoolmistress received us, and two little boys kept 
to do their pensums told us the name of the President 
of the United States, and showed us Washington and 
San Francisco on the map hanging in the room. This 
having been satisfactorily gone through with, the 
punished little boys, with the usual luck of the wicked, 
were given chocolates by E. M. and dismissed; then we 
walked out into the little cemetery, approached by a 
narrow pathway of arching sycamores. It looks out 
toward the ancient forest of Vitrimont; in between are 
more green, undulating fields ripening with the 191 7 
harvest. The walls of the cemetery are battered and 
broken and monuments and gravestones are overturned. 
There was furious hand-to-hand fighting there, and in 
those first August days the long dead again mingled 
with the living. I passed down by broken, sun-baked 
walls, reading the names on the crosses as I went, and 
these are some of them: 

Lieut. Jeannot, 26kme Infanterie, aspirant — Un soldat 
inconnu — 

Haye, Louis, Sergent — 28 soldats — 

A notre fils, Charles Diebolt, mort pour la Patrie 1895- 
1914, 26dme Infanterie — 

Charles Carron, Musicien; Souvenir d'un camarade, 
mort au Champ d'Honneur 31 aoiit IQ14 — 

24 



VITRIMONT 

A rude wooden cross bears the words: 

"Ci-git Edouard Durand, jusilU le 25 aoilt 1914 par 
des l&ches." 

As one goes out is the tomb of a young girl; Htldne 
Midon, 18 arts, victime du ier septembre 1915 — une 
priire — la plus jolie fille du village." A white and vir- 
ginal rose has been planted where she lies. In this 
cemetery lie, too, the wife and son of the mayor. 

The first upspringing of early flowers is everywhere 
— 'asters, goldenrod, wild roses — and the hot sun ex- 
tracted from each its soft, peculiar perfume. I picked 
a seemingly perfect rose from the grave of un soldat 
inconnu. Its petals immediately fell to the ground. 
Everything grows with an almost ironical luxuriousness 
on the shallow, hastily dug graves. All over Lorraine 
is this same flowering ; it has been and will be, but there 
was no time to ponder on the fate of frontier lands, for 
we were next to call on the officer commanding the 
detachment quartered at Vitrimont, who was housed 
in a reconstructed building and who had been waked 
from slumber to receive us. When I gave him my 
boxes of cigarettes for his men he said that he had 
received some before for the soldiers who had the Croix 
de Guerre. I promptly told him mine were for the 
soldiers who had not got it. Mrs. C. P. brought bundles 
of illustrated papers and postal cards. 

Soldiers are everywhere helping to get in the hay; 
sweet odors of freshly cut grass float about on the 
warm air to the sound of distant cannonading. How- 
ever, in spite of everything, it is already V aprh-guerre 
here, and the delivered population is breathing again, 
but it all gives the sensation of something prostrate that 
needs the help of strong, fresh hands before it can arise. 
Mrs. Crocker's work is on such a generous, imagina- 
tive, sliding scale, and Miss P., untiring and executive, is 

as 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

of immense tact in dealing with the Lorraine peasant, 
a peculiar type demanding peculiar handling. There 
are numberless psychological situations needing adjust- 
ment in the human as well as material affairs of dev- 
astated villages. Miss P. meets all difficulties with 
understanding plus determination. Some are content, 
some not, with what is done for them. One woman 
whose house was completed, and who was evidently 
dazzled by the result, said, "It isn't a house to live in, 
but to rent." 

Another, however, when we went into the grange 
behind her house, pointing to the posts sustaining the 
hay-lofts, said: "Will they hold? The old ones were 
twice the size." 

Sanitary improvements have been worked out as far 
as possible, but when you try to tamper with a peasant's 
pile of fumier, it's like tampering with his purse — and 
that's impossible. Quite a good deal of live stock has 
been put into Vitrimont. 

A soldier stationed with the Vitrimont detachment 
cranked the motor for us. His home was near by, and 
he told us with shining eyes that he had just bought 
for ninety francs two pigs. Somebody observed it was 
the premier pig qui coike. However that may be, the 
purchase marked the remaking of his home. 

One is appalled at the time and energy and money 
necessary for the rebuilding of this single village — a 
million francs is the cost estimated — and materials and 
workmen are increasingly difficult to get. One thinks 
of the hundreds that aren't being rebuilt. Vitrimont 
has certainly been smiled on by heaven and Mrs. C. 

As we drove home, fleecy, delicately tinted clouds 
were pinned together with mother-of-pearl cross-shaped 
brooches. It is in the air alone that there is any "war 
beauty." 

26 



VITRIMONT 

Soldiers are passing under my window, some in the 
blue trench-helmets, with their equipment ; some in their 
fatigue caps, swinging their arms, free of their eternal 
burdens; and there are officers afoot or on horseback, 
and colonials — marines, we call them — in many kinds of 
uniforms. 

The poster on the old garden wall opposite says: 
Alice Raveau viendra jouer "Werther" dimanche, le I? 
juin, 1917, en matine'e. 

Charlotte might have lived in the house behind the 
wall on which it is pasted, a gray, smooth-facaded house 
with a good eighteenth-century door, and a chestnut 
and a linden in full bloom. At the cafe on the corner 
soldiers are sitting, laughing and talking, humming, drink- 
ing their bocks, reading their papers, or throwing words to 
women who pass by, and I thought of the men who pass 
through these villages, leaving to women an inexorable 
burden and an untransmittable joy. Many swallows are 
flying about, and above it all, in the colorful afternoon 
air, avions are humming. On the wings of the French 
airplanes are stamped a great circle of color like an eye 
with red pupil, white retina, and a blue outer rim. After 
the hot day, something lovely and cool begins to come 
in at the window, and I know soldiers all over Lorraine 
are resting after the heat and burden of the day, though 
in the distance the dull, muffled sound of cannon con- 
tinues. Now I must "dress" — that is, put on my other 
dress — for the eight-o'clock dinner at Mile. Guerin's. 



CHAPTER V 

MONSIEUR KELLER 

Lun£ville, Saturday, 16th June, 8 a.m. 

AS I put out my light and opened wide my window 
L last night a rush of warm, linden -scented air came 
in, also the thick, soft, meridional voice of some soldier 
singing "En passant par la Lorraine." I, too, was pass- 
ing through Lorraine, and I got the sleep I didn't get 
the night before. 

This morning more whirring of aeroplanes, but peace- 
ful. The Taube got off yesterday; all the events of 
Friday were accompanied by that constant low-flying 
of aeroplanes, making one feel one was being looked after. 

Dinner at Monsieur Guerin's. - Monsieur Keller, the 
celebrated mayor of Luneville, whose tact, courage, and 
good sense saved Luneville many tragedies at the time 
of the German entry, took me out. He has a lively, per- 
ceptive eye, and, all in all, life seems not to have been 
unkind to him, though he has been invaded, and his 
parents before him. He received the Germans and said 
adieu to them all in that month of August. His fine 
old dwelling, where the treaty of peace was signed in 
1801 between France and Austria, is next to E. M.'s, 
and housed at one time one hundred German soldiers, 
and the general and his staff were quartered in it. He 
was, of course, the bright particular hostage during the 
occupation, and was followed about by two officers and 
four soldiers wherever he went. 

28 



MONSIEUR KELLER 

"I kept them moving," he added, with a snap of his 
perceptive eye. 

At Luneville one hundred and thirty houses were de- 
stroyed and there was much loss of life among civilians. 
The mayor has, or rather had, a property near Vitri- 
mont, called Leomont, on a hill where there was for- 
merly a Roman temple to the moon, and from this 
Luneville is supposed to take its name. The great farm 
and its ancient buildings were destroyed during the 
bombardments of Luneville and Vitrimont. , 

"It's only a war monument now," he added, phil- 
osophically. 

It's the atmosphere of Luneville that's so charming 
to me — this drop into full eighteenth century, with the 
boom of twentieth-century cannon in the distance. In 
spite of the sound of guns, there is some peace they 
can't destroy. I knew nothing about the French prov- 
inces till I got to Luneville, and I suppose it's their 
immemorial and quite special atmosphere that I have 
received. Here the war seems to be a thing of the past; 
they think of their secteur only, and of themselves as 
libergs, and talk of the war in the past tense, and it 
might be 1814 just as well as 19 14. 

A heavenly evening. We walked in the dim old gar- 
den smelling of linden. No lights anywhere, of course, 
and, though the stars were beautiful, they didn't seem 
to light up anything terrestrial ; the only things blacker 
than the night were the giant cedars. ■ At dinner was a 
youngish, much-decorated general, coming back for a 
night from the front ; though born in Luneville it was the 
first time he had been here since the war — always fight- 
ing in other parts of France. Besides the general there 
were Madame Saint-R. T., E. M., and Miss P., who 
appeared in some sort of dull-red tunic that she ought 
always to wear; the mayor and his wife (she is Gasconne, 

29 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

and very animated, though she said twenty years of 
Luneville had somewhat calmed her) ; two or three 
women with husbands at the front bringing daughters; 
several young officers; and M. Guerin and his daughter 
— the usual war-time composition of dinner-parties in 
the provinces, I imagine. Excellent and very lavish 
repast, maigre, of course, but everything else except 
meat in profusion. I didn't get to bed till after eleven. 
M. Guerin walked back to the hotel with us, and, while 
he and Mrs. C. P. talked, again I was accosted by ghosts 
of dead rulers and lovely ladies and philosophers as we 
crossed the vast, dim Place Leopold. They, too, had 
crossed it and been amorous and witty, pleased or having 
vapeurs, enveloped by linden scent, and the changeless 
stars had controlled their destinies. 

Later. 

This morning we visited the military hospital in one 
of the most charming edifices I have ever seen, an 
eighteenth-century convent -building. The first entry 
on the tableau in the hallway giving the names of the 
benefactors was 1761; the last, 1913. It is a two- 
storied, cloistered, rambling edifice, with several wide 
courtyards planted with trees and flowers, a fountain in 
the middle of one; in another a statue of the Virgin; 
beyond it a sun-baked vegetable garden; and still 
farther, behind a hedge, the inevitable little cemetery. 

We went through the wards of the hospital, high- 
ceilinged, spotless, airy, with the medecin-chef, talking 
with the wounded and distributing cigarettes. 

One of the doctors, also mayor of Gerbeviller, said to 
us, when we told him we were going there in the after- 
noon, "But don't you want to see the young German 
aviator?" 

Thinking it quite "in the note," we went up-stairs 

30 





AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT 



CEMETERY, VITRIMONT 




THE BRIDGE AT LUNEVILLE 



MONSIEUR KELLER 

again. He unlocked the door of a large corner room. 
At a table by a window looking out on another little 
tree-planted court was the young eaglet with fractured 
"wing" — arm and shoulder — in plaster. He got up 
with the military salute as we came in. I begged per- 
mission to address him in German, and when I asked 
him where he was m Hause, he answered, "Posen," 
and that it was far. He said he was very comfortable, 
but, with a longing glance at the patch of sky, added 
that he was dreadfully bored. I suppose he was, after 
being a bird in the blue ether and breaking into secular 
silences. He had been there a month, but was still very 
thin under the cheek-bones and dark about the eyes, 
and very young. He turned to the doctor with an en- 
tirely different expression — a sort of shutting down of 
iron shutters over the youthful look — on being asked 
in German if he had all he needed. 

"Why have I had no answer to the post-cards I have 
written my mother?" he asked, adding, "we also have 
mothers." 

The m£decin-chef said : "You know you can only write 
once a month; but write another, all the same, and I 
will see it is sent off." 

He had a worn French grammar on the table and had 
been diligently studying verbs when we entered. The 
doctor was so nice with him. 

There is no bitterness at the front; the more one sees 
of it the more one realizes that bitterness is the special 
prerogative of non-combatants far from the field. I 
heard an American woman say to an officer just back 
from the front, so newly back that "the look" was 
still in his eyes: 

"I'd like to see you at Cologne, destroying the cathe- 
dral. It would serve the Boches right." 

He looked at her and made answer: tl Ce n'est pas 

3i 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

comme gel, madame. Enough has been destroyed in the 
world. Think rather of reconstruction." 

Ah! les civils! 

Coming out, we met Mile, des Garets and went with 
her to her evacuation hospital near the station, which 
was a triumph of turning heterogeneous spaces into a 
single purpose. Two old railway sheds had been con- 
verted into receiving-rooms, douche-rooms, refectories, 
and several eighteenth-century cellars had been so ar- 
ranged that in case of bombardment they could stow 
away fifteen hundred wounded. This seems a simple 
enough statement, but just think what stowing away, 
suddenly, fifteen hundred wounded means ! Mile, des 
Garets, a daughter of General des Garets, has been mar- 
velous in her devotion and practicality since the be- 
ginning of the war. 

I hear the motor-horn. . . . 



CHAPTER VI 

GERB&VILLER AND LA SCEUR JULIE 

WE started out for Gerbeviller in a blinding sun, 
over a road leading through pleasant green 
meadows. That is one of the strange things of Lor- 
raine — everywhere destroyed villages and everywhere 
well-planted fields, almost as if planted by the ghostly 
throngs of heroes who lie within. For in nearly every 
field there are the little clusters of black crosses, hung 
with flowers or the tricolor badge, or quite bares — with 
the number of men who He within, or a date, scarcely 
ever a name. 

We went into the village, very ancient, that owes 
its name, Ville des Gerbes, to a miracle performed there 
by St.-Mansuy, past the completely destroyed chateau 
of the Lambertye family, and, going up a winding street, 
reached the house of Sister Julie, the heroine of August, 
1 9 14. On every side were gutted houses and piles of 
mortar and stones; one enterprising individual of the 
fair sex had installed against a resisting wall Le Cafe 
des Ruines, and some soldiers and civilians were sitting 
on bits of stone and masonry, drinking their bocks and 
reading newspapers. The convent-building is in the 
principal street, and it was unharmed save for a little 
peppering of rifle-fire and a bit of cornice knocked off — 
par la grdce de Dieu, as Sister Julie afterward told us. 
Up three steps, and one finds oneself in a narrow, an- 

33 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

cient stone hallway. Turning to the right, one enters 
a cool, peaceful room of the convent-parlor type — a 
large crucifix, lithographs of the last three popes, horse- 
hair furniture, white crocheted doilies, everything spot- 
less. In a moment Sister Julie came in. Her flashing 
eyes, her determined jaw, show her always to have been a 
woman of parts, and yet her whole life is really crowded 
into those few eventful days of the latter part of August, 
when "they" entered the town. For the rest, the quiet, 
useful routine of the nursing and teaching order of St. 
Charles de Nancy, which had been chasse at the time of 
the French Revolution; a few nuns managed to remain 
hidden, and the order has been preserved. She is evi- 
dently a responsive soul, for she immediately began to 
enact the story of the arrival of the Germans, with a 
certain art in the presentment of the tragedy of the 
little town, gained, no doubt, by many recitals. 

The Germans came into the town on the 27 th of 
August, after the heroic defense of the bridge over the 
Mortagne by a detachment of fifty-four men of the 
2d Chasseurs from sunrise to sunset, who held up dur- 
ing hours the brigade of the Bavarian General Clauss. 
Finally, at five o'clock the gray hosts got through and 
passed in with a great sound of tramping feet and ring- 
ing hoof, and, after the manner of invaders, mettant le 
feu et le sang dans le village. Sister Julie thought her 
hour also had come. In the room where we were sitting 
she had placed her thirteen wounded men, brought in 
at intervals during the day. "Mes petits," she called 
them, and her eyes shone softly at the memory. She 
sent the other sisters up to the attic, and remained alone 
to face the enemy and to beg that the house be spared. 
She went out on the little step, not knowing what fate 
awaited her, and found four immense officers on horse- 
back, with their horses' heads facing her. 

34 



GERBEVILLER 

"They thought they were Charlemagnes, immense 
men, with light hair and light-blue eyes and arched 
noses and gallooned uniforms. I was like a dwarf in 
comparison, and I am not small." To tell the truth, 
she is indeed a "muscular Christian." 

Then began the interrogatory, the ranking officer 
demanding of her: 

"Sie sprechen Deutsch?" 

She said to us, with a smile: 

"I did speak it in my youth, but it wasn't the mo- 
ment to recall my studies, and I didn't answer, and we 
remained for a few seconds looking at each other comme 
des chiens de faience. 1 I so little on the house-step, 
and they so tall on their big horses, and with poignards 
drawn from their breast pockets, pas le beau geste de 
tirer Vepee du cote," she finished, disdainfully. 

Finally, the silence was broken by the ranking officer, 
whose next words were in French : ' ' Nous ne sommes pas 
des barbares; you have soldiers and weapons concealed 
in your house. Lead the way." 

Then the four officers dismounted and, with pistols 
in one hand and poignards in the other, followed Sister 
Julie into the little room where the thirteen wounded 
men^were lying. Their helmets touched the ceiling as 
they looked about them. Standing by the first bed 
nearest the door, an officer pulled down the covers. 

"You have arms concealed." 

"We have nothing. You will find only men lying in 
their blood." 

By this time Sister Julie was not only talking, but 
acting the scene, indicating where the beds were, where 
she had stood, where the four chefs had entered, and 
how the eyes of the wounded men followed her. The 
officers made the rounds of the beds, pulling down each 

1 Like porcelain dogs. 
35 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

stained cover, Sister Julie following to re-cover the men, 
who were expecting, as was she, the order to burn the 
house. 

She continued: "They were Bavarians, and when I 
said: 'You see, we have nothing. Leave me my 
wounded, in the name of Mary most Holy,' the com- 
manding officer began to look at the point of his shoe 
as men do when they are embarrassed. I have seen 
surgeons do just that when they are in doubt about an 
operation, ' ' she added. ' ' Then he suddenly turned with- 
out a word and went out, followed by the other three, 
pistols and poignards in hand. They passed up the 
street with their detachment, 'mettant le feu et le sang au 
village; et moi, restee avec mes petits, a remercier le bon 
Dieu — -et de leur donner a boire.' " 

We gave our little offerings into her generous hands, 
and sniffed the scent of freshly baked bread that perme- 
ated the corridor. E. M. photographed her standing on 
her historic steps, and we went out into the hot, cobble- 
stoned street, to the completely ruined Lambertye 
chateau, standing in the midst of a park whose gardens 
were designed by Louis de Nesle. Two large and very 
beautiful porphyry basins near the house were untouched 
— not a nick or a scratch. On the great marble fireplace 
of what had been the big central hall, now uncovered 
to the day, we could still read the words : 

Charles de Montmorency 
Due de . . . . mbourg, 
Marshal de France. 

Afterward E. M. took some more photographs, and 
we sped homeward to pack our belongings and dash 
into Nancy to get the eight-o'clock train from there for 
Bar-le-Duc, to be ready for the high adventure of 
Verdun early the next morning. 

36 



CHAPTER VII 



BAR-LE-DUC 



Bar-le-Duc, Sunday, June 17th, 2 a.m. 

SCRIBBLING in an indescribable brown-uphol- 
stered room, where one lies on the outside of a 
dark and menacing bed covered by one's own coat, a 
strong odor of stable coming in at the window and a 
horrid black cat wandering about. It's no night to 
sleep. Two o'clock has just softly sounded from some 
old bell. I didn't hear one o'clock, I am thankful to 
say. I was in a sort of trance of fatigue when we got 
here at eleven. 

Miss P. motored us into Nancy, straight into the 
setting sun. My eyes were so tired that I didn't try 
to pierce the hot glaze, but there's a memory of running 
through green fields, with black crosses, saline installa- 
tions (Rosieres aux Salines) , manufacturing towns (Dom- 
basle-sur-Meurthe), and Gothic towers (St. Nicholas du 
Port), and a dash through the new factory suburbs of 
Nancy into the delicate and perfect loveliness of the 
Place Stanislas. Neither E. M. nor I had a permit to 
go to Bar-le-Duc, the point of departure for Verdun, 
but Mrs. P. had, so she was deputed to order dinner at 
the Cafe Stanislas, while we went to the Hotel de Ville 
to try to find the Secretaire General, Mr. Martin, a special 
friend of E. M.'s, and do what I call "cutting barbed 
wire." It seemed at one time as if the high adventure 

4 37 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

of Verdun might have to be abandoned, as the Secretaire 
General, who alone could give us the necessary per- 
mission, had been called to Pont-a-Mousson to investi- 
gate the results of a raid of German avions there and 
at Pompey that morning. However, when fate has 
made up its mind that things shall happen, any dead- 
lock is cleared up by the puppets themselves, literally 
on a string this time, for as we were standing there in 
the room with the impotent substitute of the Secretaire 
General, the telephone rang, and who was it but the 
so desired gentleman calling up about something on the 
long-distance wire. E. M. literally grabbed the re- 
ceiver, explained the situation, and he gave the neces- 
sary authority to his substitute, and we in turn gave the 
oft-repeated story of our lives from the cradle to the 
present moment, and finally could depart with papers 
in order for dinner at the Cafe Stanislas. Again as we 
walked across the lovely Place my soul was stirred with 
memories of peace, love, and the arts of peace. I 
seemed to understand anew those, words, "The arts of 
peace," and in a half-dream I looked up at the heavens. 
Again pale, charming faded tints of blues and grays and 
pinks were the background for the urns and figures of 
the sky-line of the pure and lovely buildings that sur- 
round it, and a crescent moon with something untouched 
and virginal flung a last charm about it all. 

We found Mrs. C. P. waiting at the same table at 
which I had sat two nights before with the sons of Mars 
and the man of God. We were just beginning our din- 
ner when, looking out of the window, we saw something 
strange and for a moment unclassifiable, in an almost 
impossible juxtaposition of ideas. No one's mind would 
be sufficiently mobile to grasp what it was without blink- 
ing a bit. The great, portentous black cross on its wings 
was what started the mind working properly. It was 

38 



BAR-LE-DUC 

the Taube brought down at Pont-a-Mousson that 
morning, being drawn on a camion through the delicious, 
delicate tracery of Jean Lamour's wrought-iron gate! 

1755-1917! 

We dashed out; a crowd was already gathering. A 
young French aviator with a curious look in his eyes 
was watching it being set up. Having espied the wings 
on his uniform, we asked "what and where and how" 
and are "they" dead or prisoners? Some one said, 
"C'est lui," indicating the young man, who did not 
answer our questions, but continued to stand quite still 
in some sort of dream or detente of nerves. But a man in 
the crowd said: 

"He brought it down at Pont-a-Mousson, and they are 
prisoners." We were standing by the statue of Stanislas 
le Bienfaisant, Stanislas le Bon, his reign le rdgne des 
talents, des arts et des vertus (these last not as we know 
them in 191 7), and he was looking on strange things! 
We went back to the cafe, consumed in haste and dis- 
traction the very nice little dinner, topped off by straw- 
berries and cream and the celebrated macarons des 
Sazurs Macarons, and again I found myself dashing to 
the station, which one thinks is near and isn't, accom- 
panied by my two fair friends, all going at the same allure 
militaire that I had taken forty-eight hours before with 
the two Breton officers and the Chaplain of the 5 2d. 

Wild dash at the station for our hand-luggage, and 
stampings of safe-conduct, then a hunt for the porter, 
who, with an excess of zeal (and hope), had reserved a 
coupe for us and put up the fateful words dames seules. 
Now there is no such thing as dames seules at the front. 
Many officers were standing in the corridor, one on 
crutches, so we tore the forbidding words from the win- 
dows, and the compartment automatically, though 
courteously, filled. 

39 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Among them two immense, dark-bearded men from 
the Midi, with accents to defeat the enemy, and a pale 
officer from near the Swiss frontier, as we afterward 
discovered. He smiled when I said to the dark one 
sitting by me, after the greetings and thanks: 

' ' You come from Marseilles ?" (He came from a little 
place five miles from there.) 

The officer on crutches stretched his leg with a con- 
traction of the face and a sigh of relief. They were all 
en route for home, from the same regiment, the seven 
precious days of permission counting from the hour 
they reach their homes till the hour they leave them, 
after months in the field. They had fought in Belgium, 
on the dunes, these men of the south, those first eighteen 
months, up to their waists in water, often for weeks at 
a time. They found the Lorraine landscape that so 
soothed my soul only fairly pretty, and spoke soft 
praises of le Midi. 

They all had the strange, bold, hard, shining look about 
the eyes, with a deeper suggestion of sadness, that men 
just returning from action have. It is the warrior look — 
one kills or one is killed, one conquers or is conquered; 
there is no via media. 

The pale officer from Savoy said : ' ' There should never 
be any war; c'est trop terrible; but, once given the fact 
that war exists, all means to victory are justifiable." 
And the bright, hard look deepening on his face made 
me suddenly think of Charles Martel and Charlemagne, 
and I knew it was the way French warriors have looked 
through the ages, but, oh! France. "Oh doux pays!" 

At Bar-le-Duc, dating from the Merovingians, at 
least, we descended (our bags passed out of the windows 
by the officers), and went through a dark, silent, linden- 
scented town, obliged to drag our own belongings through 
an interminable street, over a bridge across tree-bordered 

40 



BAR-LE-DUC 

black water, till we got to this abode, known to men 
by the name of Hotel de Metz et du Commerce. What 
the devils call it I don't know; I have just chased the 
black cat out, and if I don't get some sleep I shall not 
get to Verdun. There's no linden scent coming in at 
my window here. 

Bar-le-Duc, eight o'clock a.m. 

Waiting in the sandy -floored dining-room of the hotel. 
All three of us very cross. At dawn not only the light, 
but the sounds of chopping of wood, emptying of pails, 
and invectives of various sorts came in at the dreadful 
windows. At seven the maid mounted to know if we 
wanted the water in the tea or the tea in the water. 
That tea "threw" them. Not a sign of the famous 
Bar-le-Duc jellies that one has eaten all one's life, even 
outre-mer. We compared notes of furry, rumpled sheets, 
dented pillows, dark coverlets, dreadful scents, and 
unmistakable sounds. We are now somewhat restored 
by hot and very good cafe au lait, and Mrs. C. P. is look- 
ing out of the door for signs of Mr. de Sincay, who 
has just stepped out of his motor. 



CHAPTER VIII 

VERDUN 

TfERDUN! The sound is like a clarion call. Verdun! 

V It is short, but gravely harmonious. It is satisfying 
to the ear, it is quickening to the soul. Verdun! It is for 
France the word of words; in it lies the whole beauty of 
her language and of her martial glory as well. 

Who shall say it is but a fortuitous collection of letters, 
this word Verdun, beautiful as a chalice, that holds the dear- 
est blood of France? It would not have been the same 
mystically, perhaps not actually, had it been Toul or Epinal 
or even that other melodic sound, Belfort. Verdun! It is 
the call through red days and nights, and everywhere the 
sons of France rallying to it with great hurryings lest may- 
hap one be there before the other, to dye with deeper color 
the crimson of high deeds. Verdun, ear and tongue re- 
linquish you regretfully. 

Verdun, glory and sorrow of France, I salute you, 
Verdun! Verdun! 



Night, silence, and memory turning over the events 
of the day. 

I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of 
supreme personal distinction entered the little sandy- 
floored cafe, a gentleman who should always be arriv- 
ing in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or re- 

42 



VERDUN 

ceiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting 
in a library of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous 
bindings. It was M. de S., and we shortly all got into 
the big auto, we three women on the broad back seat, 
M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even 
the bend of his long back was V elegance supreme. He 
said the motor had seen three years of war-service, but 
certainly there was something unfatigued about it as 
it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, 
on the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on 
the first Verdun sign-post gave a feeling of having shot 
itself into one's heart, as well as pointing the way. 

Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing 
men back from the front, ourselves and everything else 
enveloped in a white plaster-of -Paris-like cloud of dust. 
It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas 
tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and 
brown. In some of them the men were singing the 
chansons de route that soldiers so love, and many of 
them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight 
protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. 
The grass and flowers of the wayside were as if dipped 
in whitewash, but the road, like all the roads of France 
— those veins of her body of death and life — was in 
excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red 
Cross convoys, and all the time we were swinging 
through ruined villages. 

At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his 
bayonet. Our papers being in archi condition, we 
passed through the little village of the Quar tier -General 
without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie there 
is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women 
holding up a motif of flowers in a basket ; near by there 
is an old hostelry, Le Raisin Blanc, in front of which 
soldiers were sitting, drinking their bocks and reading 

43 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, 
we pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition 
parks, looking for all the world like mining camps in 
Western towns at home. 

We arrived at Dugny at ten o'clock and descended 
to look about for a suitable place for the installing of a 
canteen, which was partly our reason for being where 
we were. There is an old country house in the middle 
of the little town, with a coat of arms above the 
door and lions crouching on its gates ; behind is a lovely 
ancient park with linden and elder trees in full blossom, 
and under them quiet, shady walks. It is used as an 
ambulance station, and convalescing men were sitting 
or lying about on the ground. We met the m£decin- 
chef, who, however, like all doctors, didn't care two- 
pence for well soldiers, and was but platonically inter- 
ested in the canteen matter — just as the military count 
out the sick and wounded soldiers. It's all in the point 
of view. 

As we stood talking a German aeroplane flew high 
above Dugny outlined in a perfect sky. Little white 
clouds of shrapnel from the vertical guns began to 
burst about it in the clear blue, and there was a louder 
sound of cannonading as the avion disappeared in some 
far and upper ether. E. M.'s brother had been once 
stationed here for months, and she told the story of his 
meeting unexpectedly his cousin Casimir. They were 
going different ways with different detachments, and 
they "held up the war" while they embraced! Smart 
officers, ahorse and afoot, convoys going to the trenches 
with rations, great carts full of bread, and ambulating 
soup-kitchens filled the little street. Verdun was but 
seven kilometers distant, and the road lay straight be- 
fore us as we left Dugny. On the horizon the outline 
of the citadel and the towers of the cathedral showed 

44 



VERDUN 

against the sky. Another endless convoy of ambulances 
and camions enveloped us in a choking white dust. 
This is the lining of the front, and it is quite easy to 
see where the war billions go. 

We passed into Verdun under the Porte de France, 
and then went immediately up to the citadel through 
the old drawbridge, all dating from the days of Louis 
XIV and Vauban, and it was at Verdun that the sons 
of Louis the Debonair met to divide the empire of 
Charlemagne. 1 

We got out by the demolished barracks, and M. de 
S. went to pay his respects to the colonel, who was ex- 
pecting him. As I descended I saw at my feet a beau- 
tiful tiny bird's nest, which I picked up with a clutching 
at the heart. The birds went away that first terrible 
spring of 191 6, the colonel afterward told me, but they 
had come back in great numbers in 191/, and were 
everywhere building their nests, in spite of the con- 
tinual bombardments. The citadel was a desolate mass 
of mortar, stones, rusty barbed - wire entanglements, 
blackened and broken tree stumps, but everywhere, too, 
were quantities of undiscourageable new green. 

We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and 
fell into conversation with him. He had been at the 
front since the beginning, and he was sad-eyed in spite 
of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth- 
century tower toppling and half -demolished, all that 

1 Verdun, the Virdunum of the Romans. In the third century a bishop- 
ric was founded there with Saint Sain tin as first bishop; 843, the treaty 
of Verdun; after the battle of Fontanet the three sons of Louis the 
Debonair, Lothair, Louis of Bavaria, and Charles the Bald, divided the 
empire of Charlemagne, with the result that not only was France 
separated from Germania, but her natural boundaries, the Alps and the 
Rhine, were lost; 1792, the Prussians besieged it in force and it was 
obliged to capitulate after two days; 1870, a heroic defense lasting 
nearly three months ending in capitulation; 1916, lis n'ont pas passe, Us 
ne passeront pas. 

45 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

was left of the ancient church, and the celebrated abbey 
of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity it was that the 
beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered, 
with a gesture of complete indifference: 

"Qu'est-ce que cela fait? A nous qui restons de faire 
de nouvelles choses, et mieux, que n'en ont fait nos aleux. 
All the comrades I loved in the beginning are gone — 
and what remains, or perishes, of brick and mortar 
is of little account beside the sum of living things that 
is lost." 

Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the 
colonel, and the young philosopher touched his cap. 
We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye, a brilliant 
officer and delightful homme du monde, loving the arts 
of peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising 
those of war. In his hands now lie the destinies of Ver- 
dun. He presented us each then and there with the 
famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper 
with his signature, and furthermore gave us an invita- 
tion to lunch, which we accepted with delight after 
delicate references to sandwiches and wine in the motor. 
We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and 
he showed us the most recent damage — of yesterday — 
when a very especially precise aim of the Germans had 
destroyed nearly everything that had been left. 

Then we descended really into the bowels of the 
earth, cemented, white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially 
aired bowels, to the very depths of the great fortress. 
To get to the mess-room of the colonel and his staff we 
had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hun- 
dred officers were sitting at dinner. There was some- 
thing deeply impressive about the dim, long, low length 
of it, and those groups of men prepared for battle. 
Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to 
me, and there seemed something of consecration about 

46 




iDejcuntr )e/ /Z Jut'n t9lf-\r^ 



J^ 



^.^HPiuVkJ. 4.I9IJ 








mjf/ + 



VERDUN 

it all. Behind the tables on the walls were hung hel- 
mets and arms. 

A young officer said to me once, "We don't tell all 
our stories there and we don't often laugh very loud." 
From it we got into the small, well-lighted mess- 
room, where kings and presidents and premiers and 
generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months. 
The staff and Paul Renouard, the painter, were wait- 
ing, and we sat down immediately to an excellent dinner, 
though the colonel said it was entirely d Vimproviste. 
There were flowers on the table, too, but these I did 
suspect were specially for us. The colonel remarked, 
with the hors-d'oeuvre, that he would take us to the 
battle-field after dinner, to the famous Fort de Souville, 
and the repast, instead of a meal, became the prelude 
to a supreme climax. The arrival of General Pershing 
was the first subject of conversation, accompanied by 
the most courteous and appreciative remarks ; one of the 
officers told of the first day when the Stars and Stripes 
had appeared in the field with the other flags, and of the 
cheers that went up. And they drank to the United 
States, and we drank to France; they praised the work 
of women, and spoke of the immense moral and prac- 
tical aid of the entry into the war of the United States. 
Whether it would shorten the conflict was another ques- 
tion. To the captain sitting opposite I said: 

"If the soul of the war has a special dwelling-place it 
is Verdun," and told him how the thought of America 
turned about it those days of February and March of 
19 1 6. "But," I added, "there was a time when I 
thought they might get through." 

The commandant answered quickly from the other 
end of the table: "Ah, madame, there was a time when 
we thought they might get through, mais l ils n'ont pas 
passe" — Us ne passer ont pas.'" 

47 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

And then I quoted the beautiful phrase of the Com- 
mentaires de Polybe: 1 

"Et Verdun, en mines, avec ses soldats, debouts, tou- 
jours dans la tempete, comme il n'y en a jamais eu de plus 
beaux . . . avec Nivelle, et avec Petain, avec Vintage de 
Raynal qui vient roder la nuit dans les decombres de 
Vaux et avec le paraphe de Castelnau sur cet autre Cou- 
ronne. ..." 

We ended a most pleasant repast, with its great under 
throb, by coffee and tilleul and a little glass of cassis 
(black-currant cordial), the native liqueur. 

Then, on into a room where we pulled up our coat- 
collars so no white would show, slung the bags contain- 
ing the gas-masks across our chests, left our flowers, 
parasols, and other impedimenta, and went out through 
the long, dim now empty hall to get into the autos. We 
waited half an hour for ours, which had performed the 
seemingly impossible feat of getting lost in Verdun. 
The officers began to get impatient, and M. de S. to 
make bitter remarks about his chauffeur; the colonel to 
walk up and down. The commandant said, "Du calme," 
and the colonel answered that only sous-lieutenants 
savent avoir du calme. "lis sont etonnants," said another 
officer with four stripes on his arm. 

Finally our man appeared, with a story no one lis- 
tened to, Colonel Dehaye getting in with us, the other 
officers leading the way in his auto. 

It was two o'clock, and a white, burning sun was 
shining on a white, burning earth as we drove through 
the crumbling streets, through houses in every stage of 
ruin, to the great plain of La Woevre, toward the dread- 
ful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides 
the ridges. 

Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of 

1 Neuvihme serie. 
48 



VERDUN 

the C6tes de Meuse, to bar the passage of the river's 
valley, and cover the Argonne. 

As we passed out of the town on one side was a ceme- 
tery where sleep four thousand, on another side sleep 
twenty thousand — and these are but a handful to the 
numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred 
earth around Verdun. The colonel named various bat- 
tered places as we passed — Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and 
finally we climbed a steep hillside near the celebrated 
Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The abomi- 
nation of desolation over which we passed once had 
been a green, smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. 
The village of Tavannes was but a spot of white horror, 
even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont and 
Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few 
blackened stumps of trees that will not leaf again. To 
the left as we looked about were the fateful summits of 
Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of 
road running between. We walked along, stumbling 
over heaps of water-bottles, haversacks, helmets, car- 
tridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader and the 
invaded — bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, re- 
mains of obus, and mixed with what lies in the earth 
of fair and brave and dear are myriads of unexploded 
shells. The country round Verdun, despite the rich 
blood that could render it so fertile, can't be cultivated 
for years on account of the vast quantities of shells 
buried in it. A man pulls a piece of wire, and he loses 
his hand, another tries to clear away bits of some- 
thing round, and his head is blown off. One of the 
officers told us of societies for the demineralization of 
battle-fields, but the work is slow and costly. 

Yet a winter's snows had lain upon it all and spring 
had breathed over it since the first awful combats of 
February, 1916. I knew suddenly some complete 

49 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

"heartbreak over fallen things" as I stumbled, and, 
looking down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a 
skull with insects crawling in and out the eyes, and a 
broken gun-stock. 

Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a 
profusion never seen before splash themselves like some- 
thing else red against the white earth, or fill great 
shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields. . . . 

The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery 
that very morning, and fresh bits of warm shrapnel 
were lying all about as we twisted in and out of the 
boyaux. I brought away but a small bit with me, hav- 
ing early discovered that a small piece is as good a 
reminder as a big bit, and much easier to carry. We 
passed the grave of a soldier buried where he had fallen, 
a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little 
cross, was running red, but he was mayhap already in 
his Father's house of many mansions. 

In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies 
gave an elastic sensation. . . . 

We first visited the emplacement of a great gun 
worked by the most complicated electric machinery, 
something that seemed built as strongly as the Pyra- 
mids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling 
that which it was cast into being to perform. When 
we came out, we climbed some last white scarred heights 
that the colonel called "Les Pyrenees" and there, 
stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama 
of Verdun — ' ' par oil Us riont pas passe. ' ' I thought of the 
men I had known who had been engaged in those dread- 
ful attacks, whose mothers and wives had looked upon 
them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers 
would behold them no more. And I had again a break- 
ing of the heart over the vast tangle, and cried within 
myself, "Shall all the world be a valley of dry bones?" 

50 




OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 1 7, I917 



*~4 




'. ■ ■% 



IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 1 7, I917 



VERDUN 

Then we hid ourselves in some boyaux well out of 
sight, for we were nearing a camouflaged battery, two 
of whose guns had been silenced that very morning. 
In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans 
were intrenched, and their shells were also falling thick- 
ly over Douaumont and Thiaumont. It was the front 
indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful moment, 
in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery 
fire had been trained on thousands of men who were 
rushing to the top in a great charge. And yet I kept 
thinking of the words of a dead hero, ' ' Nothing but good 
can befall the §oldier, so he plays his part well." l 

At that moment the enemy began to send an un- 
wonted number of shells, which were exploding just 
behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the captain of 
artillery — who had joined our party at the gun em- 
placement — to answer, and he climbed down a steep 
decline to his masked battery. In a few minutes, as we 
lay hidden in the boyau, twenty discharges sounded; 
but shells that go up, come down, and on the other 
side of the hill we were watching, who shall say what 
agony? I am so constituted that I cannot think of the 
passage of any soul into the next life other than with 
awe. 

We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 
850 feet, where men live and breathe and have their 
being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow spaces. But it 
seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare 
and the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front 
of each one of us, we crept or felt our way up and down, 
stumbling through vault-like passages, where we would 
come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or 
writing by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in 
their kitchen, or waiting at the little dispensary, and 
1 Alan Seeger, Letters and Diary. 

Si 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

then we stumbled up again into the heat, reverberating 
from the white hills. 

On the way back we passed a little chapel installed 
in an old cemented dugout. On the altar were many 
flowers. I bent and peered into the dimness, and, as 
I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood 
the words Introibo ad Altar e Dei. I thought of the 
Lamb of God, and martyrs new and old, and the cata- 
combs and the primitive Church. . . . Again men in 
stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth. 

We were photographed against a particularly sinister 
group of blackened trees, and we picked up some hel- 
mets and bits of obus. As I write, the couronne of one, 
quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my side. 

Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the 
motor to stop, and we got out, and, walking through a 
field of deep, waving grass, found ourselves in the largest 
of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of broad graves 
where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France, 
and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, "Scio 
quod Redemptor meus vivit et in novissime die resurrec- 
turus sum et in came mea videbo Deum Salvatorum meum" 

All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore some- 
times a name, but oftener a number only: 140 soldats, 
or 85 soldats. The round tricolor badge hung from 
every cross. There were a few graves of officers who 
could be identified, their bodies having been brought 
in by friends or faithful orderlies. How anything could 
live on those fire-swept hills is the wonder, not that 
any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell upon 
me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an es- 
pecially dear comrade — Colonel Dubois, I think his 
name was — dead in some heroic manner, I could look 
no more. 

We finally got back into the green freshness of Ver- 

52 



VERDUN 

dun, whose normal state, I see, is to be vine-bo wered, 
tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After the scarred and 
blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets, 
the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, com- 
ing from those heights where "all the round world is 
indeed a sepulcher" . . . and near the station is the 
monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun in 1870. 

Of the Cercle Militaire on the right bank of the Meuse 
little is left except the walls, but it is no loss architect- 
urally, and messieurs les officiers are otherwise engaged. 
The banks of the Meuse are a pitiful sight. The old 
houses that reach over the water are roofless, bits of 
mattress hang from broken windows, and heaps of mor- 
tar are falling into the river. The great Porte Chaussee 
of the fifteenth century, with its two huge gray towers, 
is unharmed. We stopped at the theater for a moment. 
A big shell last month had made a sort of pudding of 
it. We crept in through a large aperture, to find the 
orchestra stalls precipitated onto the stage, and the 
loges sagging, ready to fall. We then went up into the 
old, high part of the town, and Colonel Dehaye, a true 
lover of the arts, in sadness showed us the cathedral and 
the charming old buildings that surround it. The huge 
church constructed according to Germanic traditions 
has two equal transepts, with high and beautiful vault- 
ing, which is now so damaged that the roof at any 
time may fall. Inside were masses of debris, and 
nothing was left of the famous stained-glass windows 
except powdery bite of color on the floor. The colonel 
had rescued some old Spanish Stations of the Cross, 
and had put in safety a few other portable things of 
value. We passed out through the sacristy, which was 
a scene of disorder, bits of vestment, torn altar-cloths, 
and books lying about on the floor. 

"But," I said, "the Germans didn't get here?" 
5 53 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

"Oh," answered one of the officers, with a smile, 
"ce sont nos bons frangais." 

Then we descended into the crypt, the remains of the 
church that Pope Eugene III built in the twelfth cen- 
tury. Leading down to it is an old winding stair, with 
a delicious eighteenth-century wrought-iron railing. An 
artist in a white blouse, sent to restore some frescoes 
dating from the twelfth century, was rescuing from too 
complete destruction a beautiful figure of Christ with 
something stern and immutable in His look, reminding 
me of the Christ in the church of San Cosmo and San 
Damiano in the Roman Forum. We then went into 
the cloisters, with lovely and diverse motifs on their 
vaultings, very much damaged in parts, a big shell 
having landed in the courtyard which they inclose. 
M. Renouard had stationed himself there with his 
easel, before a beautiful arrangement of trees and grass 
and enchanting old statues on mossy pedestals. In 
front of him was a great heap of fallen masonry, and a 
beautiful bit of toppling vaulting that the colonel had 
had propped up by beams, though he said: "Demain ou 
apres-demain cela ne sera plus — it's all at the mercy of 
a shot." A sculptured Holy Family, somewhat the 
worse for war, is plastered into one side, dating from the 
fourteenth century. 

From there we passed into what had been a seminary 
until 1914, and one of the rooms with rows of lavabos 
(not of the eighteenth century, as the colonel observed) 
looked out on the great plain of La Woevre, and again 
the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what 
had been a council-room there was an old choir high up 
over the door, with a little balcony giving a Spanish 
effect. 

Coming out, at the north side of the church, an an- 
cient Romanesque statue of Adam and Eve on the 

54 



VERDUN 

outer hemicycle of the apse and some little windows, 
also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In 
the ground underneath the statue of Adam and Eve 
a great shell had opened up a Roman foundation and 
walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hid- 
den during ages. 

Near the church is the great Cour d'Honneur, once 
the house of the bishop, a very perfect example of Louis 
XIV, making me think of Versailles; but it, too, has 
received many a blow in its lovely heart. One longed 
so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in 
being those lovelinesses of another age. 

We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget 
what he was doing at Verdun), which, fortunately, has 
not suffered much up to now, though it, too, is at the 
mercy of a shot — to-night, to-morrow, or the next day. 
It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful 
old door, bearing inscription and date, through which 
one passes into a tiny V-shaped court with a flowering 
linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone 
stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, 
leading to the upper stories. 

Though it wasn't an occasion in which to think how 
one felt, the flesh was weary by this time, and we went 
gladly back to the colonel's mess-room, where we had 
tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold champagne 
coupe d'eau, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty 
of Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. 
Another specialty of Verdun is the dragees (hard, 
sugared almonds), but the factory, so one of the officers 
said, had been destroyed the year before in one of the 
bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken 
their teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets. 

The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the 
cinematograph representation after, but we were ob- 

55 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

liged to regretfully decline, as we had to pay our respects 

to the general at Y , to whose courtesy M. de S. 

owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by 
we looked into the long, narrow hall where the repre- 
sentations are given, the sight of which the colonel 
offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled 
for me forever that most boresome of modern things, 
had I assisted at one underneath the citadel of Verdun. 
The hall was hung with flags of the Allies. With sudden 
tears I saluted, ours waving among them. 

We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his 
group of officers standing by the auto at the entrance to 
the subterranean passage, and though I had a con- 
sciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought 
again "Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he 
plays his part well." 

Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I 
ever dreamed of going to Verdun, when I talked for three 
hours of battles and scars with a young hero wounded 
on Hill 304, June 9, 191 6. He is a flashing-eyed, straight- 
featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what 
it is to have made, and with astounding ease, the sac- 
rifice of the life that he loves so, and drinks in full 
bumpers. And this is part of what we said, one of a 
thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand 
happenings, of which Verdun is the golden frame: 

De G. — "There was something hanging about Ver- 
dun; 'lis ne passeront pas, et Us ne sont pas passes. 1 If 
the enemy could have but known how thinly, poorly, in 
so many places it was defended! It was seemingly the 
will of Heaven rather than the strength of mortals that 
they were not to pass, not man, not artillery, but the 
high destiny of nations. 

"When I lay during those hours at the poste d'observa- 

56 



VERDUN 

tion on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling 
'shell square 17,' or 16, or whatever it might be, I could 
see clearly the havoc in the German ranks as the shells 
would fall. Great groups of men would be blown to 
atoms and new formations would press in to take their 
place. The whole horror was there before me, mapped 
out in numbered squares. 

"I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the 
fourth Zouaves, who wouldn't have gone, anyway. It 
was a work I could do alone, lying with a sand-bag 
against my head, my field-glasses in my hand, and be- 
fore me my field map held down by four sticks. We 
lay there just under the crest of the hill from two o'clock 
in the morning until the next afternoon, watching seven 
attacks. Toward three o'clock I was wounded, and 
I knew it was only a question of time and chance 
when I would lie like the dead man at my side, that 
Dueso had been pressing his feet against, and whose 
place I had been sent to take. Almost at the same mo- 
ment I caught sight of Dueso spinning around, holding 
his elbows to his side, and crying out: 'Nom de Dieu! 
Nom de Dieu! I've got it in the arm!' — but trying 
with the other hand to undo his cravate. 

"Two jets of blood were now spurting like two 
faucets from my leg, the big artery was cut. Qa y est. 
In five minutes I'll be dead, I thought, and there came 
a fainting away and a thinking not on God, but on still 
untasted joys of the flesh and life — not even on my 
mother's grief; and waking up after years, it seemed, 
and calling for water, and Dueso bending over me, 
after a frantic twisting at his cravate, and a frantic 
pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one 
hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting 
away. A delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and 
I said to myself, 'Ce n'est que ga, mourirf ('Is death 

57 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

only this?') I have seen so many men die, and what- 
ever their agonies, if long or short, minutes or hours or 
days, as it may happen, just before dying something 
gentle and simple takes place." 

E. O'S. — "The inevitable dust to dust, the natural 
law fulfilling itself?" 

De G. — "It may be. This rictus de la mort, I haven't 
seen it, though I have heard men screaming and cursing 
and praying in the trenches as they got their blow, and 
watched their agonies, but before death something else, 
softer, always happens. Unless it comes too suddenly. 
I remember once being on the dunes in Belgium, and 
against the yellow sand men were sitting in red trousers 
and chechias, and one was telling a tale of laughter 
when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his 
brains was flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then 
it got blue, and then it sank and was no more, like the 
laughing man himself from whom it flowed, and his tale 
of laughter. . . . About nine o'clock we were brought in. 
Dueso had been lying with his head under my armpit, 
and his feet still on the dead man, and we would both 
come out of a faint from time to time and ask for water. 

"Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being il est plus 
chic que moi. He had been in jail for various reasons 
not very chic, and I was warned against him when I 
took him for my orderly, but to him I owe my life. 
Now he is in Salonique, cite a Varmee, knows how to live 
in those regions, hard as nails, originally from Tunis ; a 
dark man, with dark mustache and very big white teeth." 

E. O'S. — "One thinks so often how little the common 
soldier, defending honors and riches that he doesn't 
share, has to gain. There is nothing for him, in fact, 

58 



VERDUN 

except to step out into anonymous death; at a given 
moment to make the sacrifice of his life, or his eyes or 
his limbs, knowing nothing of war except its horror, 
rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal, 
oftener not. But," I continued, after we had sat silent 
for a while, ' ' who will carry it all on ? Few like yourself 
are left, and it is not enough. France is bleeding white — 
France, whose sons are heroes, not fathers!" 

De G. — "What does it matter if we do go? There 
are the little ones coming on. It will be like something 
out of which a whole piece has been cut and the ends 
must be sewed together. The very old, and the very 
young, the children, are these ends. We shall have done 
what we were born to do. This is the immortal history 
of France that we have made, her chant du cygne, too, 
the most beautiful of her epics and it is enough to have 
lived for that. To others the carrying on of the genera- 
tions. ..." 

A pale rose light begins to come in at the window, 
but sleep cometh not. Fortunately, if need be, I can 
do without it, but I must close my eyes now. He, too, 
watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. . . . 



CHAPTER IX 

CHALONS. — CHATEAU DE JEAN D'HEURS. — REVIGNY, 
THE "LINING" OF THE FRONT 

EACH, on comparing notes, was found to have spent 
the night on the outside of the bed. One of the 
party, who naturally wishes to remain anonymous, 
found a cafard, the classic cockroach, in her ear toward 
dawn, and Aurora was welcomed by no hymn of praise 
from her. 

Now we are sitting drinking lemonade on the pave- 
ment in front of the abode of iniquity. We have been 
twice through the hot town, which consists of a modern 
town around the station, and a picturesque old one on 
a hill at the back, to find the proper authorities for the 
stamping of our papers with the military permis to go 
to the chateau of Jean d'Heurs, belonging to Madame 
Achille Fould, for luncheon. We caught the major by 
a hair's breadth ; he was disappearing around the corner 
by the military commandature on his bicycle. Then to the 
prefecture for permission to telephone to Chalons for 
rooms that night; on returning, found Miss M. and 
Miss N. awaiting us. They have been working at the 
"Foyer des Allies " near the station. They want now to 
get a much-needed canteen in shape at Chalons, and are 
asking us to help. The word from the colonel of Ver- 
dun is an "open sesame," and we will investigate en 
route to Paris. 

60 



CHALONS 

ChAlons-sur-Marne, io o'clock p.m. 

It's been as long as to Tipperary since the scrawl at 
Bar-le-Duc. 

At 11.30 we got into the comfortable motor Madame 
Fould sent to bring us to Jean d'Heurs' for lunch. It's 
a beautiful old chateau of the eighteenth century, given 
by Napoleon to the Marechal Oudinot, and in the Fould 
family since those days, though not lived in until the 
war by the present generation. It made us feel quite 
like "folks" as a side- whiskered, highly respectable, 
rather aged majordomo received us and led us up a 
broad stairway and showed us into a big library where 
Madame Fould, her seven infirmidres, and a young officer 
were waiting. After that, a perfect lunch in the way of 
each thing being of the freshest and most delicate and 
tasting of itself. The young officer was recovering from 
a wound received at Verdun last September, followed by 
a trepanning, evidently highly successful, as, in addi- 
tion to all his senses, he had a thick mat of hair. 

The library, to which we returned for coffee, was 
lined with the most precious books in the most precious 
bindings, one whole side containing first editions only 
from Voltaire and J. -J. Rousseau to Chateaubriand and 
Taine. And I ran my fingers with such a friendly feeling 
over some soft and lustrous bindings. 

The vast spaces of the chateau are now made into 
wards, and relays of several hundred men are cared for 
in them. White hospital beds are pushed against 
elaborately frescoed walls and Empire gildings. Every- 
thing in spotless order. Afterward we went out into 
the beautiful old park, where convalescent men were 
sitting or lying about under the great trees. The park 
is now closed to visitors, the fair sex from neighboring 
villages having been too generous in their offerings on 
the altar of Priapus. It's a lovely spot, and Madame 

61 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Fould has had her hospital going since the beginning of 
the war. 

At two o'clock we motored into Revigny, accom- 
panied by the handsome young trepanned officer, who 
deposited us at the military headquarters for the stamp- 
ing of our safe-conducts. Mrs. C. P., who can put her 
head through a stone wall, without injuring it, as neatly 
as any one I ever saw, proceeded to perform the feat, 
with the result that the major in command gave us all 
permission for the next ttape, Chalons. Then Mrs. 
C. P.'s young son, serving with the American Ambu- 
lance, met us, motoring over from Z ; a friend came 

with him, originally from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 
rather discouraged at the quiet of the secteur in which 
he was stationed. But all he has to do is to wait. 
Everybody at the front eventually gets what's "coming 
to him." Mrs. C. P.'s boy had on his Croix de Guerre, 
got for fearless ambulance work at Verdun during one 
of the big attacks. 

Revigny seen from the inside is a hole of holes — 
but through it defile continually the blue-clad men of 
France. Twelve thousand had already passed through 
that day. In the carrefour of the road by the station is a 
ceaseless line of convoys coming from or going to Verdun. 
This once banal little village has come to have something 
symbolic about it, though looking, as one passes by, like 
dozens of other destroyed villages. But inside it is the 
lining of the war — that thing of dust, fatigue, thirst, 
hunger, sadness, fear, despondence, hopelessness, run- 
ning up and down the gamut of spiritual and physical 
miseries. "Theirs not to reason why." . . . 

The English canteen is the only bright spot in the 
whole place. Those sad-eyed men, like us, love and 
regret, and are beloved and regretted; women have let 
them go in fear and dread; and all over Europe it is 

62 



CHALONS 

the same, east, west, north, and south — all they love 
they lay down at the word of command. I watched for 
an hour the blue stream of heavily laden men as they 
passed in, coming up to the counter with their battered 
quart cups, drinking their coffee standing, in haste, that 
the comrade following might be sure to get his drink, 
the sweat dripping from their faces. Fifteen minutes 
later a great thunder-storm broke, and thousands of 
sad-eyed men were huddled together, shelterless, like 
sheep, suddenly soaked; the hateful dust became the 
still more hateful mud. I left it all in complete desola- 
tion of spirit, and wondering, Is God in His heaven? 

Revigny was worse to my spiritual sense almost than 
the battle-field — there all was consummated. Here the 
men are still passing up to sacrifice. 



CHAPTER X 

MONT FRENET. — LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE. — THE 

RETURN 

Chalons, io p.m. 

WE dashed into the train at Revigny during the 
hail-storm, an infernal kind that didn't cool the 
air, and arrived at Chalons at six o'clock. No cabs, at 
least none for us, so we begged two Quaker women with 
the red-and-white star in the little black triangle on 
their sleeves, who were getting into the only visible 
conveyance, to take our luggage and deposit it for us 
at the Hotel de la Haute Mere Dieu, whose name so 
appealed to me. We paid our share of the cab, and all 
and everything departed, we on foot. Chalons seems 
quite without character as one passes through the streets, 
though I caught sight of several old churches and, alone, 
would have lingered on the busy bridge that spans the 
Marne. We got to the Hotel de la Haute Mere Dieu 
and interviewed the female keeper of that special para- 
dise, who said she had nothing for us, had received no 
telephone message from the prtfet at Bar-le-Duc or any 
other prefet from any other place. Then Mrs. C. P. — 
the Verdun day and the Bar-le-Duc nights having some- 
what stretched our nerves — began to get annoyed; the 
desk-lady finally asked us, did we belong to the West- 
inghouse Commission, which we didn't. We then be- 
took ourselves to the streets. Nothing at the Hotel 

64 



MONT FRENET 

d'Angleterre, nothing at the H6tel-Restaurant du 
Renard. We finally asked a large, beady-eyed, deter- 
mined-looking female, standing at a door, if she had 
accommodations or knew of any one who had. She 
proved to be the sage-femme of the quarter and eyed us 
askance. 

Just then appeared a very comme il faut, pretty young 
woman with an expression at once so charming and so 
modest that we did not hesitate to accost her and tell 
her of our plight — that it looked as if we should be 
passing the night a la belle etoile if some one didn't do 
something for us. She hesitated, looked at us, hesi- 
tated again. Smashed down on her head at a smart 
angle was the identical hat that Mrs. C. P. was wearing, 
blue with a twisting of gray, from Reboux. I think 
that hat crystallized things, for she ended by saying, 
sweetly : 

"I have a room that I sometimes offer to friends; 
only," she added, "there is a horrible stairway leading 
to it." 

We turned our backs on the sage-femme, doubtless 
naturally good, but soured by the constant witnessing 
of the arrival on the scene of apparently superfluous 
human beings (I say "apparently," for who shall decide 
which souls are precious?), and followed those neatly 
clad, small feet and slim ankles up a winding stairway 
that might have been of any epoch — except the nine- 
teenth or twentieth century, and found ourselves in a 
charming little interior, spotlessly clean. "Cest a voire 
disposition," she said, and then a servant appeared, a 
refugee from Tahure, as we afterward learned, a gar- 
rulous refugee. I beat my breast later on when I heard 
the loud bassoon, telling Mrs. C. P. that I even hated 
refugees and that that one would have, if possible, to 
contain her tale till I had had a night's sleep. At the 

65 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

moment I hated her with all the unreasoning hatred of 
the beneficiary for the benefactor. 

Well, to make a long story short, closets were opened, 
the freshest of embroidered linen sheets, the largest of 
towels, were got out, and were left to us in the hand- 
somest of ways with the refugee, the owner departing 
to her country house. The refugee managed to get in 
part of the story of her life and she brought hot water; 
she was from Tahure and left on the run with an aged 
husband, just before the entry of the enemy. 

Then we looked about the pleasant room. The first 
object I espied was a pair of manly brown kid gloves, 
the next a blue gas-mask bag, and a cigarette-case, with 
a crest, lying near a volume of Alfred de Vigny. (Can't 
you see them reading it together?) And there was such 
a comfortable chaise-longue for him to rest on, and an 
expensive, very "comfy" rug and many cushions. As 
the refugee from Tahure proceeded to make up the bed 
and sofa she interspersed the story of her life with re- 
marks concerning her mistress, like: " Allez, elles ne 
sont pas toutes comme cela, elle a un coeur d'or"; "Moi, 
qui vous le dis, elle ria pas une mauvaise pense"e." 

At this juncture we delicately asked, But where does 
she live? "Oh, he has given her a little chateau in the 
environs." This was a convenient town apartment with 
the one big room giving on the Place de la Republique; 
at the back a dining-room and little kitchen. Having 
removed the dust of travel, hot water being produced 
in a jiffy from the gas-stove on the kitchen range, we 
descended to take dinner at one of the restaurants near 
by. We were so tired about this time that the decalogue 
wasn't much to us, neither the Law nor the Prophets, 
but be it remembered of us, we did love our neighbor 
as ourselves. 

When we came back after supper the sofa was spread 

66 



MONT FRENET 

with large, crisp, spotless linen sheets, the bed the same, 
the refugee gone, and here we are in this clean, low- 
ceilinged room with eighteenth-century wood-panelings 
and charming door-handles of the same period. There 
is a crayon of the present tenant reflecting her sweet 
and candid expression over the mantelpiece, on which 
are two Dresden-china figures and a small white-marble 
"Young Bacchus"; furthermore an etching by Hellu 
of the Duchess of Marlborough, which made one feel 
quite poised. In fact, there is nothing demi about it. 

The Place de la Republique is full of soldiers coming 
and going, and there are several ambulances of the 
Scottish Ambulance Corps drawn up by a big fountain 
representing three women (typifying the Marne, the 
Moselle, and the Agne). Over the soft, warm night is 
borne the low boom of cannon. The guard has just 
called out: "Faites attention! Lumiere au troisidme 
e"tage" — so I must stop. 

Tuesday, 9.30 a.m. 

Sitting in the Place de la Republique on chairs bor- 
rowed from a little lace-shop, and waiting for the cab 
to come to take us to General Go'igoux, to whom 
Madame Fould had given us a letter of introduction. 
Just opposite is the inhospitable Hotel de la Haute 
Mere Dieu, and I have been telling Mrs. C. P., who has 
gone to buy some fruit, of the story of Voltaire and 
Madame du Chatelet passing through Chalons en route 
from Versailles to Luneville. At Chalons Madame du 
Chatelet thought she'd like to have a bouillon at the 
Hotel de la Cloche d'Or, where they stopped to change 
horses. (It still exists and is the only one we didn't 
try last night.) It was brought them to their carriage 
by the aubergiste herself, who had learned from the indis- 
creet postilion the identity of the illustrious travelers. 

67 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

When Longchamp, the valet of Voltaire, asks to pay, 
she firmly demands a louis d'or for the bouillon. "La 
divine Emilie" protests, the woman insists that at her 
hotel the "price of an egg, a bouillon, or a dinner is a 
louis"; then Voltaire gets out and tries by amiable proc- 
esses to explain that in no country in the world did a 
bouillon ever cost a louis; more cries and reproaches; a 
crowd gathers; Voltaire, strong in his right, doesn't 
want to give way. Madame du Chatelet points out the 
gathering crowd, now quite noisy. Finally they pay, 
Voltaire commending to all the devils the hospitable 
town of Chalons-sur-Marne; they depart to the ac- 
companiment of the gibes of the amiable inhabitants. 
It may be autre temps, but not autres mceurs; it's just 
like the woman at the desk at the Hotel de la Haute 
Mere Dieu, who wouldn't take us in, in any sense, last 
night. 

The most awful-looking cab has just drawn up in 
front of "our" house, and a smart American ambulance 
officer is trying to get in. 

In the Train en Route for Paris. 

The first quiet breath I have drawn, and very com- 
fortable it is to sink into the broad seats, out of the 
glare of the setting sun, and feel there is nothing to in- 
spect save the flying aspect of nature for the next three 
hours. 

The handsome officer this morning proved to be Mr. 
B., and he didn't get that cab, which, however, we 
promised to send back to him once we were deposited 
at the general's headquarters. 

General Goigoux is most agreeable. When he asked 
us where we were lodged, we threw a stone at the Hotel 
de la Haute Mere Dieu and told him of our Good Sa- 
maritan. He gave a grin, if generals are supposed to 

68 



MONT FRENET 

grin, when we said that we had not disturbed her to any- 
great extent, as she had, in addition, a country place 
where she really lived. We then told him of our meet- 
ing with Miss N. and Miss M., who had asked us to 
investigate the canteen prospects on our way back to 
Paris. The installing of one has long been the idea of 
General Goigoux, who loves his poilus, and he immedi- 
ately rang the bell on his table — among his books was a 
German Baedeker of eastern France — and in a moment 
a captain with a sad face and a black band on his arm 
appeared, and we departed in a huge military auto to 
the station to investigate the great railway shed that 
the general has requisitioned for canteen purposes. 

Going through the streets, we were held up for a 
moment by a detachment of prisoners in various uni- 
forms and from various regiments, but all with P. G. 
(prisonnier de guerre) marked in large letters on their 
backs. A tall, upstanding set with ringing tread, 
not at all unhappy-looking, despite a something set 
about their expression, seemingly in very good physical 
condition. 

Statues of the top-hatted, frock-coated political men 
of nineteenth-century France have banalized the public 
places of every town in the doux pays. They simply 
can't compete with the saints and kings and warriors of 
the artistic periods — it's too bad they have tried. 

At 12.30 we got back to our pleasant quarters, to 
find our hostess there, in a very smart dark-blue serge 
dress from Jeanne Halle. In addition to the chateau, 
the shop down-stairs, called "Aux Allies," where all 
sorts of edible delicacies are sold, belongs to her together 
with a tall and beautiful red-haired Frenchwoman. 
This is her up-stairs resting-place during the day. We 
sank on bed and sofa, exhausted by the heat, the visit 
to the station to inspect the canteen facilities, which 
6 69 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

seemed most promising, visits to two churches, and 
luncheon in the crowded Restaurant du Renard. In the 
church of St.-Alpin white-bloused experts were busy 
removing the beautiful sixteenth-century stained-glass 
windows. "If 'twere done, 'twere well 'twere done 
quickly." That continued booming of guns made one 
realize at once their fragility and their beauty. 

Shortly after, a handsome young officer came in, a 
gentleman, and speaking beautiful English. It wasn't 
'"he," however, but a friend of his, and we did a little 
"society" talk — the weather, the necessity of learning 
the languages young, the theater, that Re jane was get- 
ting old, and "L' Elevation" was bad for the morals, 
and fashions, if the skirts could get shorter — but noth- 
ing of the war. 

At two o'clock another military auto was announced, 
which the general had sent with a doctor to take us to 
Mont Frenet, four kilometers from Suippes and six 
from the German lines. The young officer departed; 
we veiled and gloved ourselves and descended, and got 
into the motor, where we found a large, dark, military 
man inclining to embonpoint, who thought he was good- 
looking, and started out. The first thing we met as we 
got out of town on the dusty, blazing highroad was a 
little funeral cortege, preceded by a priest. The body 
of the soldier was draped in the tricolor, and following 
to his last rest, close behind, was his camarade, with head 
bared. He had doubtless expired in the big hospital 
near by, one of those lonely hospital deaths that hun- 
dreds of thousands have suffered before transfiguration. 

We were in the great plain of the Champagne Pouil- 
leuse that leads to Suippes, Sainte-Menehould, and 
stretches out to Reims — a plain with great, white, 
chalky scars of quarries, interspersed with fields and 
dark patches of pine woods. I asked the doctor about 

70 



MONT FRENET 

the site of the ancient camp of Attila and the battle 
of the Catalonian fields, but his knowledge of the matter 
was vague and his interest perfunctory. I thought 
afterward he might have had a more personal afternoon 
planned than that of taking two objective-minded ladies 
to Mont Frenet. There was once a great Roman road 
from Bar-le-Duc to Reims, and all about are little 
churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly 
touched up in the eighteenth. 

After three-quarters of an hour we found ourselves 
nearing what might have been a modern mining settle- 
ment. It is the great front hospital of Mont Frenet. 
A model establishment organized and conducted by a 
man of heart and brain, Doctor Poutrain. Young, 
elance, alert, he took us the rounds of his little world, 
from the door where the ambulances deposit their 
wounded, their dying, and oft their dead, where they 
are sorted out, through the numberless wards, even to 
the model wash-houses and the places where the gar- 
ments of those brought in are scientifically separated 
from their inevitable and deadly live stock. 

As we passed through one of the wards, I saw the 
doctor's eye change, and, following it, I perceived, as 
he quickly went to the bedside, a face with the death 
look already on it; and in a moment, with a slight sigh, 
a soul had breathed itself out — en route to the heaven 
of those who die pro patria. 

And I thought in great awe, "All I know or ever 
will know of that human being is his supreme hour." 
And so fortuitous, so sudden was it all that I had not 
even time to breathe a word of prayer, nor even to 
reach out for his hand. And I, come from so far, so 
unrelated to him, was thus the destined witness of his 
passing. I can't get it out of my mind. 

Doctor Poutrain loves his broken men, and he said, 

7i 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

"I want no man who has been severely wounded or 
mutilated to leave my hospital without his decoration." 
He had tears in his eyes as he stood by a bed where a 
bright-eyed, thin-faced boy was lying with a hip fract- 
ure. "He brought a comrade in, under fire, who was 
shot off his back as he was carrying him in." 

In one of the beds an aviator was lying, brought in 
three days before; the eyes, the mouth, the whole face 
had still the peculiar look of strain. Indeed, three faces 
stand out in one's mind — the captivity face, the hard, 
shining face and eyes of unwounded men just from the 
combat, and the faces of wounded aviators. About 
this time I noticed the gloomy look deepening on the 
face of our accompanying Esculapius, and it suddenly 
occurred to me "he is one of those who support with 
difficulty the praises of another." For we had been 
very explicit in praise of Doctor Poutrain's wonderful 
installation. 

It was a slack day, and according to the record in the 
antechamber there had only been 517 brought in that 
day. 

We have tea with the directrice of the gardes-malades 
(ten or twelve women only), a friend of Madame Fould's. 
As we sat there talking I discovered that the eager 
m£decin-chef had had, before the war, as hobby, arche- 
ology and ethnology, especially of the prehistoric races 
of Mexico; that he also possessed one of the few Aztec 
codices existing — all of which we discussed to the sound 
of the German guns and the whirring of their airplanes. 

We finally made our adieux, came home over the hot, 
unspeakably dusty road of the Champagne Pouilleuse, 
unreasonably disappointed that nobody would give us 
permission to make a little detour by Suippes, then 
under fire. We got back to our headquarters, packed 
our belongings, and diffidently brought up the subject 

72 



MONT FRENET 

of remuneration, which the belle chdtelaine firmly re- 
fused. I was traveling light, without a single thing 
approaching the superfluous, but Mrs. P. had a break- 
fast-cap and her tortoise-shell toilet things and trees 
for her shoes, and she also found among her be- 
longings a lovely amber box, which she presented in 
token of our gratitude. We could make the garrulous 
refugee from Tahure not only happy, but speechless, 
which was more to the point; and here we are, looking 
out on a darkening world, and there are soldiers bathing 
in the river, near stacked guns, and everywhere little 
detachments are marching down dim roads, and there 
are the eternal troop- and equipment-trains going to 
the front — and I feel an immense regret at leaving it 

all. . . . 

Paris. 

As we were sitting in the dining-car, idly wondering 
how on earth we were going to get from the station to 
our respective abodes once the train had deposited us 
at the Gare de l'Est, or planning to spend the night 
there, the Marquis de M. passed through the car. His 
motor was to meet him, and he gallantly offered transit, 
that can be above rubies and pearls par le temps qui 
court. 

When we got to Paris at 10.30 we saw in the dim 
light, as we stepped into the big motor, voyagers de- 
parting with luggage on their backs, or, preparing to 
await the dawn, sitting on it. We got into the motor 
with Comte de , the Marquis himself sitting out- 
side, "for the air," as he said, and also because there 
was no more room inside. 

As we rolled along through the dimly lighted streets, 
the air dense and hot, a terrific hail- and thunder-storm 
suddenly deluged the town, and especially the generous 
Marquis outside, well punished (as usual) for his kind 

73 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

act. When, slipping and skidding, we finally pulled 
up at my hotel, a very wet gentleman, but remember- 
ing his manners, said, "Au plaisir de vous revoir, madame." 
(He must really have wished me to all the devils, where 
he would never meet me a second time, hoping it was 
a last as well as a first meeting.) I had to laugh, also 
he, the pleasure was so evidently doubtful. It ended 
by his betaking his soaking person into the auto, and I 
came up-stairs to find my lamps trimmed and burning 
and my beloved mother awaiting me to hear "all about 
it." 

So may one go to the front and return. . . . 



PART II 



CHAPTER I 



BY THE MARNE 



Gare de l'Est, Wednesday, July 25th. 

NO, it isn't possible, even for one whose business is 
not that of stopping bullets, to go toward the com- 
bat a second time without a thrill. 

Few soldiers in the station; they are mostly at the 
front, at Craonne and Le Chemin des Dames and other 
sacrificial places, and in a week or two the empty beds 
in the hospitals will be full again. Some officers are 
hastening back from their permissions with pasteboard 
boxes and other unwar-like accoutrements. One is sit- 
ting by me, a straight-featured young man with dark- 
ringed eyes, his Croix de Guerre and fourrage're, 1 reading 
Brin de Lilas. In forty-eight hours he may be dead. 
Another officer is reading Cceur d'Orpheline, and Le Pays. 

Miss N., with something of serene yet brooding in 
her being, plus a sense of humor, arrives with a tele- 
graphic pass from army headquarters at Chalons, which 
may or may not "pass" the train conductor. 

Later. 

Chelles, where the arts of peace in the form of a ver- 
micelli-factory testify to the arts of war by having every 
pane of glass broken; and once there was a celebrated 
abbey at Chelles which was destroyed, with a tidy 

1 Regimental decoration in the form of a cord worn over the left 
shoulder, passing under the arm. 

77 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

amount of other things beautiful, at the time of the 
French Revolution. 

Farther along much thinning out of the woods, the 
beautiful warmth-giving, shade-giving forests of France. 
In one place there is a planting of young, slender trees, 
and I thought on those other children of France who 
must grow to manhood, remake her soul, transmit her 
immortality. The first harvest is stacked and yellow, 
and nature is densely, deeply green where it had been 
pale and expectant. Even the Marne, which we caught 
up here, has a deeper color than in June, as it reflects 
the lush green. 

Meaux, with its cathedral rising from the center of 
the town, untouched except by time. Meaux has now 
come to be a sort of joke ("de deux maux choisir le 
moindre") which few can resist — I've even heard it at 
the Theatre Francais — and it's supposed to be the heart's 
desire of the embusque, far enough from the front not 
to get hurt, and far enough from Paris to be out of 
sight. 

Chateau Thierry, with its first vintage of white grapes, 
and I bethought me how the whole of France is one 
vast wine-press — "He is trampling out the vintage 
where the grapes of wrath are stored." 

Epernay, with its peculiar church tower. The great 
building of the champagne Mercier firm near the station 
has every window-pane broken, and part of it is serving 
as a Red Cross station. The wave of invasion pressed 
hard through Epernay that August of 1914. 

In the dining-car we sat at a table with two officers — 
an airman, tall, deep-eyed, some sort of tic nerveux dis- 
turbing his face, with the Grand' Croix de la Legion 
d'Honneur among other decorations; and a captain of 
infantry, who had been months at Arras, and at Verdun 
the terrible March of 19 16. 

73 



BY THE MARNE 

About the time that the cross-eyed waiter (it was 
easy, poor soul, to see why. he wasn't wanted in the 
trenches) threw the last set of plates with a deafening 
crash down the line of diners (the captain of infantry 
said it was just like the first-line trenches), the airman, 
whose nerves couldn't stand it, pursued, rather 
irritably : 

"You don't even read the communiques any more, I 
wager. Oh, les civils!" 

"I can't truthfully say I do, always," I answered, 
feeling called on to defend the sacris civils. "After three 
years of it we are fatigued and bewildered by the spec- 
tacularness of it, the great, dazzling, hideous mass of it, 
and you who perish on the battle-field but perform an 
act that all must some day perform, only different in 
that it is far better done — duke et decorum — but, after all, 
the same act that we must perform against our will, at 
the mercy of some accidental combination. It's the 
same outcome, 'and one's a long time dead.' " 

After a pause and a deep look, perhaps it is the look 
men have when alone in the secular spaces, he answered : 

"Choisir et aimer sa mort, c'est un peu comme choisir 
sa bien-aime'e''' and suddenly a flash illuminated my 
soul, showing me something of the dulce as well as the 
decorum of dying for country. 

And then we looked out of the window, and there 
came into my mind a completely commonplace event 
that caught my attention in the first wonderment and 
horror of the world war. Accompanied by her daughter, 
an elderly woman, one August evening of 19 14, took 
the Fifth Avenue motor-bus to get some fresh air, and 
they placed themselves on top. At that epoch, instead 
of going straight up the Avenue, which was being repaved 
around about Thirty-fifth Street, the omnibus took a 
turn into Madison Avenue and reappeared again at 

79 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

the north side of Altman's. Now the roof of the porte- 
cochdre of Altman's has a motif of bronzework. The 
omnibus lurched just at this point; the head and hair 
of the old lady were caught in it ; she was lifted up from 
the top of the omnibus, remained suspended in air for 
an instant of time, then dropped to the pavement, 
where she breathed out her soul. Doubtless there 
are those who will understand why this completely 
unimportant matter has remained in my mind — even 
why I thought of it at that moment. 

Chalons-sur-Marne, 
36 rue du Port de Marne. 
An i860 house requisitioned by the military authori- 
ties for the Dames de la Cantine. 

6.30 p.m. 

Sitting in a little glass-inclosed veranda even with 
the ground. The side against the house, in between 
the doors and windows, is painted in a crisscross pat- 
tern of dark green against light green, and the wood- 
work is that favorite but uninspiring shallow brown; 
a large, empty, double-decker cage for birds is in a 
corner. The veranda leads into two low-ceilinged rooms 
with parquet flooring and little squares of Brussels car- 
pet. In the first is a writing-table, some arm-chairs, 
and a horsehair sofa is across a corner; brown wall- 
paper ornamented with the inevitable oil-paintings of 
"near" Corots, and "farther" Guido Renis — everything 
distinctly early Victorian, and something soothing in its 
atmosphere after three lustrums of art nouveau. After 
all we've been through in art lately, early Victorian 
isn't as bad as we once thought. 

I looked for a moment into the walnut bookcase and 
found bound volumes of La Semaine des Families, 1850- 
60; Le Musee des Families of the same dates: Le 

80 



BY THE MARNE 

Magasin d* Education, of the eighties; and the curious 
part is that here beside the Marne it doesn't seem of 
any special country, but of a special period. 

The kitchen leads out of the dining-room (which 
latter is the spiritual twin of the salon), and has an 
old, unused fireplace with a high masonried shelf above 
it and a beautiful ancient fireback with coat of arms. 
Near the high window is a little range and the inevi- 
table gas-stove. I put my valise in the sitting-room 
and went out into the old garden, untouched since the 
winter's sleep and the spring's awakening. It looks 
out on the road; beyond is a raised walk along the 
river, and across the stream, just opposite, is the station 
and the evacuation hospital. 

But I was feeling uneasy as I looked about, for I was 
separated from my carnet rouge, 1 which has been un- 
necessarily reft from me by a too-zealous station in- 
dividual. Miss Mitchell had met us, smiling and 
waving, which ought to have been a patent of respec- 
tability, from the other side of a bayonet, the side we 
wanted to be on; but the man had a dullish eye and 
didn't see that we were birds of a feather, and, any- 
way, had just been put in authority and was enjoying 
his full powers, after the usual manner of the unaccus- 
tomed. 

So I departed, and got sopping wet in my only suit 
(am traveling lighter even than the first time), and my 
garments were furthermore ravaged by falling pollen 
from a linden-tree under which I had confidingly stood 
during the downpour. I was a sight, but I had to get 
that carnet rouge. Any one who has been in la zone des 
armies and has been separated from it will understand 
the orphaned and anxious feeling that possessed me. 

1 The sauf-conduits for the army zones are in the form of little, red, 
paper-bound books. 

81 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Later. 

A pale brightening of the western sky after the 
heavy rain. Two avions de chasse passing swiftly to 
the northeast. I wandered out of the garden, past some 
modern houses (this part of Chalons, for some reason, 
is called Madagascar), taking the little raised earth- 
walk by the Marne. The river, always slow-flowing, 
has an almost imperceptible movement in front of our 
house, and there are many grasses and reeds ; the banks 
are weedy and little green boats are made fast to them, 
and nature is a bit motley and untidy. A soldier is 
fishing on the opposite side near the station. An officer 
and a black-robed woman pass. Farther down, the 
banks are thickly wooded and the trees glisten after the 
rain; even the great railway station is a-shine, where tens 
of thousands of men pass daily, together with millions 
of francs of war material, and it all looks like some not 
very sharp wood-cut of the sixties — the kind you 
wouldn't buy if you were looking over a lot; but, some- 
how, lived in, it is charming. Then I found myself on 
a path by the river, with a lush border of trees, poplar, 
willow, white birch, ash, hawthorn, and clematis-twined, 
wild-grape- vined bushes. On the other side were ripe 
wheat-fields. Near a sycamore a man and a woman 
were locked in an embrace, whether of greeting or fare- 
well I know not. Neither was very young — this much 
I saw before I turned my eyes and went on; but when 
I passed there again they were- as before, their eyes 
still closed; and I suddenly knew them for true lovers, 
who count not moments, but were lost in some infinity ; 
and for all I know they may be there yet, and if not 
they, then others, for the spaces of love are never empty. 
To some it may be nonsense that I am talking, but there 
are those who will know. All the while there was a dull 
boom of cannon, and other men who could love women 

82 



BY THE MARNE 

were giving up their lives; and I seemed to understand 
little or nothing, but did not need to understand, for I 
had a full heart, which is better than a full brain. And 
I cried, as I walked back, "Domine Deus, Rex Celestis, 
Pater omnipotens," and left it all — the soft love and 
the hard death — where it belongs. And I was glad 
to have walked for a few moments alone by the green 
Marne. 

When I got back I found Joseph of the 71st Chasseurs 
a pied sitting with Miss N. Joseph thinks we are friends; 
he knows we are friends, so different from "world's" 
people, who are suspicious and think nobody loves 
them, or fatuous and think everybody does. 

We sat in the i860 dining-room. There is a pressed- 
bronze clock on the mantelpiece, representing a mild and 
smiling Turk with a drawn sword — and there is a side- 
board you could find in Barnesville, Maryland, or 
Squedunk (I forget where Squedunk is), and the ex- 
tremely "distant" Guido Renis decorate the brown 
walls, without, however, enlivening them. 

And this is Joseph's story — Joseph of the grateful 
heart, Joseph with two years and a half of service, 
Joseph who won't be twenty till December, Joseph with 
his young, round face and flat nose, dark under his 
pleasant eyes, and a bit hollow under his cheek-bones, 
and with decorations on his chest: 

"I never knew my parents; the Fathers brought me 
up. I have had only good from them, and when they 
were chasses I was taken with them to Pisa. I was 
going to continue my studies, mais la guerre, que voulez- 
vousf They call me 'le gosse,' I was the youngest in 
the regiment. Now I am alone in the world since my 
brothers were killed, one at Verdun three weeks ago, 
the other last year on the Somme. I miss the letters," 
he added, simply. 

83 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

"But, Joseph, tell us how you got your Croix de 
Guerre." 

"Oh, I only happened to save the life of my captain 
at Verdun. We were making a reconnaissance, and he 
fell with a ball in the hip. I started to bring him in, 
with a comrade who was hit by a piece of shrapnel in 
the head and killed instantly. I caught 'mine' in the 
arm, but I was still able to drag my captain in by his 
feet. It was quite simple, and since then he is very 
good to me." 

Joseph is en perm, his regiment is at Reims, but he 
spits blood and his voice is hoarse — he was gassed a 
few weeks ago. 

"It smelt of violets," he said, "and we didn't know 
that anything was the matter till an officer rushed tow- 
ard us. Eight of us never got up. I'll never speak 
clearer than this." 

Joseph stayed to supper with us — a supper of soupe 
a Voseille, scrambled eggs, and salad, but the brown, 
dull, little room gradually seemed to fill with a sifted 
glory, and we left our meal and went out to find the 
whole world dipped in transparent pink, and the great 
Light of Day about to disappear, a reddish ball, in a 
mass of color of an intenser hue. The delicate wil- 
lows were like silver candelabra reflected in the Marne, 
which now was a satiny pink. The wheat-fields were 
seas of burnished gold. 

Over all a terrific boom of cannon was borne on the 
damp evening air. It seemed impossible to do other 
than walk magnetically on and on toward the dreadful 
sound, out of that world of surpassing beauty toward 
those supreme agonies, toward Mourmelon and Reims, 
where men were laying down their lives, even as we three 
women walked the fields at the sunset hour. I remem- 
bered suddenly a picture known and loved years ago — 

84 



BY THE MARNE 

a woman kneeling by such a river-bank, her hair falling, 
her face buried in her hands, called "Hyrnnus an die 
Schonheit," but over the pink-and-silver beauty of my 
sunset world I heard the deep and dreadful tones of 
their cannon, and the answer of the 75's, which Joseph 
likened to the miaulement d'un chat — and all the world 
seemed askew, and I looked through tears at a golden 
half-moon that was rising in the pink to add an un- 
bearable beauty to it all. 

In my room, 10.30 p.m. 

The cannon still booming. 

My room also has a dark-brown paper with great 
white flowers on it — some cross between peonies and 
dahlias, if such union is possible — and heavy mahogany 
furniture; a few books which I immediately inves- 
tigated, on a gimp and tasseled trimmed shelf, for a clue 
to the one-time dwellers. Among them were two by 
Victor Tissot, Le Pays des Milliards and Les Prus- 
siens en Allemagne; the dates were 1873 and 1875, 
and they told of that other war; and I looked at Ger- 
many through the eyes of forty years ago as I turned 
the pages of Le Pays des Milliards, listening to the 
191 7 guns. History was not only repeating itself, but 
tripping itself up! 

Joseph is sleeping in the garden in the steamer-chair. 
I hear his gas-cough, a cross between a croupy cough 
and a whooping-cough. We wanted him to sleep in- 
side, but he said il J'ttoujje" and took the steamer-chair 
out under the spreading chestnut-tree, and sleeps the 
sleep of youth, even though weary and gassed. 

Thursday, 26th July, 1.30 p.m. 
Sitting in the garden, after lunch, where we have had 
coffee under the spreading chestnut, ready to go to 
Bar-le-Duc. Avions are whirring in the perfect blue, 
7 85 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

and we plainly hear the cannon. We are to take night 
shift at the little Foyer des Allies. When I say that we 
carry nothing with us, not more than if we were going 
to take a stroll about town, one sees that the journey 
will be fairly elemental. 

Many white butterflies with an unerring instinct for 
beauty are flying in and out of the little white ash-tree. 
And in spite of the boom of cannon there straightway 
came to me a dear and fugitive realization that beauty 
is the first thing sought by instinct, its earliest and its 
last love, its imperishable means and its end. And how 
every other seeking of instinct comes after perpetua- 
tion, conservation, survival of the strong, and how it 
accompanies and pushes the soul toward its trans- 
figuration. 

Suddenly, under the rustling chestnut, all about me 
the murmur of the gently stirring garden, I found I 
was mad for beauty, and some liquid, long, unrepeated 
lines came to me, I know not why: 

E il pino 

ha un suono, e il mirto 

Altro suono, e il ginepro 

Altro ancora, stromenti 

diversi 

Sotto inmimerevoli dita. 



Che Vanima schiude 

novella, 

Su la favola bella 

Che ieri 

M'illuse, the oggi fillude, 

O Ermione. 1 

When you're not carrying anything with you except 
your money and your safe-conduct, you can dream till 
it's time to take the train. 

1 " La Pioggia net Pinelo." — D'Annunzio. 
86 



CHAPTER II 

THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 

Epitaphe 

Benis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en viclimes, 
Et n'ayant de la guerre eprouve que Vhorreur. 
BSnis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur coeur 
La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes* 

Benis ceux qui sont morts comme Us avaient vecu: 
Assidus noblement a de modestes tdches. 
Benis ceux qui, n'etant ni tres braves, ni Idches, 
N'ont su que rtsigner leur corps pauvre et vaincu. 

Benis ceux qui sont morts pour servir et dSfendre 
Des honneurs et des Mens dont Us n'ont point leur part. 
Benis ceux qui se sont donnes sans rien attendre 
De leur posterite, de I'histoire ou de I'art. 

Benis ceux qui, luttant seulement pour la vie, 
Ont ignore les lois qui reposent sur eux, 
Mais compris en mourant qu'ils sont les malheurcux 
En qui depuis toujours Jesus se sacrifie. 

Benis, Us le sont tous, et saints entre les morts, 
Ceux qu'on ne pleure guhre et que nul ne renomme: 
Car, devant les heros, Us ne sont rien que VHomme; 
Car, parmi tant de gloire, Us fondent le remords; 

Car leur don si naif, ce don de tout leur etre, 
Mele aux vertus du sol les graces d'un sang pur, 
Pour composer, avec lout Vor du ble jutur, 
Les moissons d'un esprit dont V Amour sera maitre. 

Georges Pioch. 
87 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

ChAlons, 27th July. 

Half past four. Half an hour ago, alerte, sirdnes. 
We hastily arose from resting, and have just come up 
from a really charming cellar, with nice vaulting, evi- 
dently much older than the house itself. 

Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy 
in my mind, blurred with fatigue, in a compartment with 
five silent, dead-tired officers. It's a great human 
document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o'clock 
till six I watched the poilus fill the Foyer des Allies, in 
and out, in and out. From time to time the voice of 
the station-master called out some fateful destination. 
I was thankful for any momentary slackening of the 
rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouil- 
lon one can also give a word, the precious word, where 
all is so anonymous. Between three and four there was 
a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed, scraggy - 
mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, 
said to me, "I am father of five," and, showing his 
blue trousers tucked in his boots, added, "I am of the 
attacking troops." He then shifted his accoutrement 
and dug out from his person the photographs of the 
five children and his epouse, and I think more and more, 
"it is for the young to fight." I can't bear the look on 
the faces of the middle-aged going up to battle. 

The poilu trying to find his purse or the photographs 
of his family, among everything else in the world that 
he carries on his person, pressed tightly against other 
men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a sardine 
trying to turn over would feel! 

The next with whom I spoke was a gaillard with a 
glancing blue eye, reddish mustache and high color, from 
Barcelona, of French parents, and he insisted on speak- 
ing Spanish with me. His brother is professor at Saint- 
Nazaire. 

88 



THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 

"Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George 
instead of about the family." 

This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English 
nationality. 

"Do you think we are going to win, senorita?" 

"Of course," I answer, "with the help of God. Dios 
y victoria," I add, piously. 

But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, 
"Victoria y Dios" and then gives way to a comrade 
who was at Craonne in April. 

He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth 
and was probably naturally flesh-loving, and wanted 
his coffee very hot, and looked approvingly at me as I 
said: 

il Mon ami, I know all about it, if coffee isn't too hot, 
it isn't hot enough." 

He ended a conversation about an engagement he 
had been in by saying: "The most awful sensation is 
to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses and to know 
that you have got to walk into it and to see the men 
ahead of you stepping with strange steps — and some 
falling." 

As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain- 
fearing, yet that is the way his dust may be called on to 
return to dust. 

There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, 
but nobody ever jokes about a bullet. It's a thing 
with a single purpose — and you may be it. 

Our headquarters are at , not far away, and it 

was at Bar-le-Duc that I first saw our own men among 
the French for the same strange purpose. Something 
stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing, 
scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they 
have come across the seas to do — quite simply kill or 
be killed. It's all to come, for "He hath loosed the 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword," and it is 
for the young to fight. 

At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eigh- 
teen fried eggs; they are oozing with money, and they 
aren't feeling sentimental. One of the four young 
spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was 
changing a big plug of tobacco from one side of his 
mouth to the other) said, with an appraising look at the 
counter, that he could "buy us out," and a second 
added, "And more, too." 

"How about those coming in later?" I suggest, and 
then I ask how long they've been here. 

"Been here? Just five hundred years," a small one 
answers, promptly, "and the next time the 'Call' comes 
they won't get me. They can take the house and the 
back fence, too, but they won't get little Joe. This 
loving another country's one on me!" 

"Don't listen to him, lady; he's homesick. We're 
out to can the Kaiser, and he'll take some canning 
yet, but I say next July he will be about as welcome as 
a skunk at a lawn-party." 

And then even the homesick one cheered up. The 
simile made me think of summer evenings in New Eng- 
land, but I only asked when they were to go back to . 

"We ought to have been there at 10.15." 

I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The 
hands pointed to 3.30. They were then five and a 
quarter hours late. 

"You don't know 'Cwwcourt.' It's a fierce place," 
said one, in answer to the look. 

"Aren't you busy?" 

"Holy smoke! She says are we busy! Why, we dig 
ourselves in all day, and we dig ourselves out all night, 
and somebody after you all the time. I don't call this 
war. We're out for real trouble." 

90 



THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 

"Well, you'll get it when you see your officer," I re- 
marked, unfeelingly. 

Just then a poilu whom they seemed to know ap- 
proached with his ten centimes. One of the Sammies 
knocks it out of his hand onto the counter, points to 
his own chest, says, "On me, a square meal," and 
opens his bursting purse for me to take whatever is 
necessary. 

The poilu, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of 
paper, says to me, with eyes the size of saucers, "Sont-ils 
tous millionaires?" . . . 

Apart from his "private resources," which seem un- 
limited, the American receives just twenty times a day 
what the Frenchman does. 

But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so 
untried, so generous — and a sea of blood awaiting them! 

Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin- 
faced, dark-eyed man with glasses shiveringly drinks his 
hot chocolate. "It's too long, the war," he says, "two 
years — even three — mais cela traine trop, nos bonnes 
quality s'usent et se per dent." 

"What were you before the war?" 

"My father has a book-shop at Chartres, j'adorais les 
livres et une bonne lampe" he added, so simply. 

And then a trench-stained comrade came up to him 
and they talked after this fashion — one couldn't have 
done better oneself — while I mopped up the counter and 
refilled my jugs: 

"This country pleases me. I will come back and 
take a turn about after the war." 

"Mon vieux, one should never return to a place where 
one has been happy ; one is apt to find only regrets and 
disillusions. You are thinking of the young boulangere 
here, but she herself will leave the town after the hos- 
tilities! And then what? Un seul etre vous manque et 

9 1 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

tout est depeupU! But nothing, however, counsels one 
to return to a place where one has suffered." 

From this point of view one must say that the life 
of the poilu is ideal, for when he will have tried all the 
fronts, including those of the Orient, the war will per- 
haps be over. 

And then they slung everything except the kitchen 
stove on their persons, and, thanking me, went out to 
be killed, or, in the very best event, to get la bonne 
blessure. 

One in a thousand, one in ten thousand gets it, la 
bonne blessure, indeed, not disfiguring, not incapacitat- 
ing, and afterward, sometimes, decorations, honors. On 
the other side they say, "Gluck muss der Soldat haben." 

A strange, intense blue, like some outer curtain to 
the windows, announced the coming of dawn, and out 
of it appeared nine men shivering. 

"Why are you so cold?" I ask. 

"II fait du brouillard," said one, with a beard in a 
point and wearing a beret, such a man as would have gone 
into an inn of Rabelais's time, en route for some seat of 
war; and as he drank his big bowl of chocolate he 
added, "Cela console; toward dawn one's courage is 
low." 

Then a young, stone-deaf man with blue eyes and deli- 
cate, pink-skinned face came in with something vague 
and searching in his look. I didn't realize in the first 
moment what was the matter, as I asked, did he want 
coffee or chocolate, but a comrade pointed to his ears ' 
and said, "Verdun." He himself smiled, a dear young 
smile, but sudden tears came to my eyes and I slopped 
the coffee. 

A little before six we closed the canteen, which is 
always swept and garnished between six and seven, and 
went back to the house where Miss Worthington, who 

92 



THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 

so admirably runs it in conjunction with Miss Alexander, 
lives. 

I lay me on a sofa with my shoes unlaced — my feet 
by that time were feeling like something boneless and 
bruised, mashed into something too small. 

Seven-thirty a great knocking at the door. 

" Valerie! A la cave, madame!" 

I was then in a state where a bomb couldn't hurry 
me, but, the knocks continuing, I finally got up and 
went down-stairs to find the lower floor full of people, 
too blas6 to go into the vaulted cellar below. 

'''Quelle comedier said one woman. "Moi, jern'envais." 

"Quelle trage'die, si c'est pour vous cette fois," answered 
another, pressing her baby to her breast. 

"The bits of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns 
firing at the aeroplanes make more victims than the 
bombs," said another. 

Miss Worthington appeared at that moment, but 
decided, however, to go back to bed. I went out into 
the hot streets; the early sun was shining in a faultless 
sky. The Foyer des Allies had been hastily evacuated 
at the alerte, according to orders, so I asked for the 
nearest church, where I could sit down in peace, or com- 
parative peace, out of the glare and the heat, not to 
mention the enemy airplanes. I was directed up the 
principal street, told to turn down by the river, and 
was proceeding under the dusty poplars to the church 
of St.-Jean, when suddenly some beauty of the morn- 
ing touched my face and a feeling almost of joy suc- 
ceeded the fatigue of the night. I was turned from 
thoughts of men going to their doom, and destruction 
coming from the lovely sky, and I could receive only the 
morning light, and the glory of the shining river and the 
rolling hills was for the moment mine; and I saw how 
"dying, they are not dead." . . . 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Mass was over when I got to church, but I sat 
down, crossed myself, and commended, with a sud- 
denly quiet heart, the world of battle to its God, 
and then, instead of wwlacing my shoes in the 
sanctuary, I proceeded to lace them up, having 
walked from my abode with the laces tied about 
my ankles; it wasn't as sloppy as it sounds, con- 
sidering what was going on overhead. But I found 
myself thinking of praying - carpets, and rows of 
sandals outside of dim mosques, and things and ways 
far from Bar-le-Duc. 

After twenty minutes of a somewhat hazy contem- 
plation of other than war mysteries, I went back to 
the canteen. 

Betwixt the time I had left it and my return a bomb 
had fallen between it and the station; a large piece of 
roof had been removed from the station, and a very neat 
nick had been made in the corner of the canteen where 
we kept our hats and coats and hung up our aprons. 
The street in between looked like an earthquake street. 
I stood quite still for a second of time — not thinking — 
you don't think on such occasions. The Barrisiens, or, 
in plain English, the Bar-le-Dukites, were engaged in 
business as usual. 

I then began the cutting up and buttering of endless 
large slices of bread, with a Scotchwoman, who has un- 
modifiable opinions about Americans — any and all 
Americans. Even when she only remarks, "I saw two 
new people in town yesterday, very American-looking, 
very,'" you feel there's something the matter with the 
States, and if you had time you'd get argumentative, 
even perhaps annoyed. 

Soldiers were coming in again. To one tired, deep- 
eyed man, sitting listlessly, with the heavy load slipping, 
I said: 

94 



THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 

"Vous avez le cafard, 1 mon amiV 

And he answered, suddenly, as if the words had been 
ejected by a great force from his soul: 

"Je tnonte demain — and I can't bear the sound the 
bayonet makes going in." 

I answered, "A hot cup of coffee and you will feel all 
right again." But to myself I said, "There'll be trouble 
for him; he can't any more." 

And then a huge Senegalese, all spinal column and 
hip, waving a generous five-franc note in his hands, 
came along and wanted to know if there was anybody 
has mariee among the ministrants, as he had a day off. 
The service is quite variegated, as will be seen from 
these random specimens. 

Last night we walked up the hill of the ancient town. 
A yellow half-moon, hanging behind the fourteenth- 
century tower, further decorated the scene. We sat on 

1 In VHorizon I found these lines from Verlaine, with a few added, 
concerning le Cafard, by "Bi Bi Bi": 

Quelle est cette douleur 
Qui penetre mon cceur? 
C'est bien la pire peine 
De ne savbir pourquoi 
Sans amour et sans haine 
Mon cozur a tant de peine. 
En effet, cher Verlaine, 
C'est bien la pire peine 
Que ta fameuse peine 
Et les poilus sans art 
La nomment le Cafard. 

But le Cafard differs from Verlaine's peine in that it is a very special 
kind of world-pain, and very complete; for those in its grip know why, 
as well as not why, they suffer. The memory of loved and early things, 
very probably not to be known again, is part of it. The consciously un- 
reasonable hope that all will be well in an extremely uncertain future 
is another part of it — and underlying it is crushing physical fatigue, 
sleeplessness, hunger, cold, heat, the whole smeared in the blood of 
brothers and foes, the dull reaction after killing, or escape from being 
killed — one can't feel that there is anything vague about le Cafard. 

95 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

immemorial steps, in a little V-shaped place that framed 
the valley and the town, and talked of war and wars. 
I thought how the legendary Gaul had wandered over 
these hills and these wooded stretches, with his battle- 
ax and skin about him, and long-haired women had 
waited his return, and children had played in front of 
caves. As the clock on the tower struck nine a woman 
appeared, waving her arms and calling out, "Une in- 
cendieV and we went higher up the steps and saw masses 
of smoke and flames on one of the hills. It was the 
huge barracks for refugees that was burning, and the 
flames were blowing toward the near-by encampment 
for German prisoners. Then we went down the ancient 
roadway through the dim, warm, summer streets to the 
canteen overflowing with blue-clad men, singing, drink- 
ing, disputing. A blue mist of smoke and breath hung 
about them, with a smell of hot wool and worn leather — ■ 
and it was the war. As I put on my apron I found 
myself repeating the words: 

Benis ceux qui sont worts simplement: en victimes, 
El n'ayant de la guerre eprouve que Vhorreur. 
Benis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cceur 
La haine et tons ses maux, la gloire el tous ses crimes. 



CHAPTER III 

THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

27th July, evening. 

THIS afternoon Lieutenant Robin fetched us to the 
theatrical representation the Division Marocaine 
was to give. 

Generals thick as leaves in Vallombrosa were there 
in a hemicycle about the stage, pressed close by the 
flood of poilus. Terrible heat in the great, glass-roofed 
auditorium, a slanting afternoon sun pouring itself in 
like hot gold. Some thousands of spectators; thick 
odor of poilu; blind being led in ; groups of one-legged 
men naturally gravitating to one another; groups of 
one-armed the same. A few gardes-malades from the 
hospitals, and ourselves the only women in the audience. 

We were presented at the door with some copies of 
a charming, really literary newspaper, U Horizon, Jour- 
nal des poilus, and there was a little paragraph, "Hi6r- 
archie frangaise qu'on trouve au Thedtre des Armees," 
which also described the protocol of seating, "In the 
first row near the stage wounded men are lying, im- 
mediately behind them wounded men are sitting, then 
come ladies, if there are any — and then come officers!" 
General Goigoux and General Abbevillers sat near us. 

While waiting we looked at UHorizon and laughed 
with General Goigoux over a paragraph showing the 
philosophy of a son of Mars under certain circum- 
stances, and it was the following: 

97 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Nature is kind. She places the remedy near the ill and often 
cures, as one has seen, evil by evil. 

A woman, too much loved, sent me a letter so cruel that I didn't 
even have the strength to tear it up, but carried it around in my 
pocket for weeks. 

One night, being quartered in a stable, I took my coat off and 
hung it up. 

The next day, no letter. A cow had eaten it. Nature is kind. 



When General Gouraud, first in command, entered, 
the "Marseillaise" sounded, a thrill went through the 
vast assemblage, and we all arose. Le Lion d'Orient is 
tall, intensely straight, his whole thin, khaki-clad body 
on parallel lines with his perpendicular armless right 
sleeve. Long, straight, brown hair en brosse, bronzed 
skin. His entry was a thing not to be forgotten. I 
wondered "Is it the East that stamps great chiefs with 
such majesty, that can give them such calm?" and I 
thought of Gallipoli — blue seas, battles, wounds, hos- 
pital ships. Then the curtain rose on one of the most 
delightful theatrical representations I have ever seen, 
screamingly funny, and quite chaste. 

But all that entrain, all that life, to be snuffed out to- 
morrow or the next day, or the next? At Craonne or 
Reims or Verdun or wherever it may be? And how 
natural that they should sing of love and women, and 
say witty things concerning food and raiment and the 
government, till the end! 

After the performance, during which nobody had 
ever been so hot before, the sun moving across the hall 
and grilling each row in turn, we passed out in a great 
jam of poilus. One huge man, with the thickest of 
meridional accents and red cheeks, and eyes like two 
black lanterns, and a coal-black beard, was gesticulating 
at a small, hook-nosed, blond man. 

"Le Midi, le Midi — qu'est-ce que tu en sais, toi, Mtaf 

98 



THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

Les Anglais font dija pris ton trou de Calais, aussi je 
te demande, sale type, what army corps took the plateau 
de Craonne" and he burst into a great laugh of triumph. 
Then, borne on the blue waves, we found ourselves in 
the open air and realized what we had been breathing. 
General Goigoux presented us to General Gouraud 
standing by his motor with several other generals, while 
a squad of German prisoners, looking out of the corners 
of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was 
dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more 
conscious of that harmony of browns and straight lines, 
that something remote yet majestic in his being. As we 
turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave, and 
he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man's shoulder. 
Ok, enfants de la patriel 

Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m. 

All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of 
the sirdnes over the plain of Chalons, and it seemed to 
me like cries of men of the Stone Age. 

These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of 
beings of the twilight ages; elusive emanations, dim sug- 
gestions of their psychologies have at moments pos- 
sessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains. 

Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired — too tired 
to care whether "they" got here or not — and stayed in 
bed during the alertes, but I thought of airmen, attackers 
and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a golden half- 
moon lighting a dim heaven. 

Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the 
ways of peace. 

At 4.30 I heard Joseph's gas-bark and knew he was 
again with us, stretched out on the chaise-longue under 
the chestnut-tree. 

As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

about the stars of the gorgeous night that was so soon 
to give way to another summer day, and I suddenly 
saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere 
going forth at some word of command to their doom. 
There was a flinging back of my thoughts upon me, and 
I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill of early 
dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see 
nothing for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for 
what it is — the abode of mad horrors. 

Later. 

Paid my respects to General Goigoux for an instant 
of time (I can always get out quickly) in the old gray 
house of the Rue Grande fitape, and found him as al- 
ways, distingue, human, untired, cordial. Officers pass- 
ing in and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with 
maps. Later Colonel Rolland of the ist Zouaves, very 
jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men and adored by 
them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a 
deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad 
station, to inspect the great, dreary sheds that with 
time, labor, and much energy are to become La Cantine 
Ame'ricaine. Blue- clad men were lying around like 
logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to 
step over legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. 
A dreadful sound of hammering was echoing through the 
vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb the 
slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby 
in comparison to the first-line trenches. 

We stepped into the kitchen. A smiling, twinkling- 
eyed cuistot x who probably had something awful the 
matter with him — flat-foot or hernia or something of the 
kind, or he wouldn't have been there — with pride asked 
us to partake of some of his coffee. He proceeded to 

1 Cook. 

IOO 



THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

dip it from a great, steaming caldron, pouring it 
into worn tin cups carefully wiped first on his much- 
used apron. My soul responding to echoes of fraternity 
enabled me to drink with a smile, which, though it 
started out rather sickly, behaved all right as I re- 
turned the cup with compliments. The cuistot said he 
hoped the cantine would soon be in order, and as he 
looked through the small opening through which he 
shoved the cups to the poilus, rendered still smaller by 
piles of bread and festoons of sausage, he added, li Les 
tetes de ces dames seront plus consolantes que la mienne." 
He was a nice, human cuistot, though no lover of water 
except for making coffee, and then, as we fell into con- 
versation, he added, "Si la guerre pouvait finir; mais il 
y a un fosse' de dignity et personne des deux coUs n'ose le 
sauter. y ' These poilus are astounding! 

We then visited Lieutenant Tonzin, who is going to 
decorate the cantine as never cantine was decorated. 
He was at the camouflage grounds. As one knows, 
camouflage is de Vart de la guerre le dernier cri, but the 
grounds were discreetly veiled from public gaze, and we 
were directed into a little garden, green-treed and sun- 
flecked. In it was a trestle with a large, very clever, 
plaster cast of a camion taking poilus somewhere; they 
were hanging from every possible place except the 
wheels, just such a sight as one constantly sees on the 
roads near the front. 

The gayest sounds of whistling and singing issued from 
the rather coquet sun-flooded house behind the garden. 
Several other young artists appeared on hearing women's 
voices, loving life, adoring art with a new adoration, 
and who with something of wonder and much of thank- 
fulness found themselves for a sweet, brief space in 
charge of the camouflage work, with brush and chisel 
again in hand instead of bayonets. 
8 ioi 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

We looked at the designs for the cantine decorations, 
quite charming — but we delicately suggested suppress- 
ing the figure of a too fascinating "mees" that was to 
embellish the entrance and point to the poilus the way 
to those delights. We feared some confusion of 
thought. 

Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sit- 
ting there, drew my first quiet breath in Chalons, out 
of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling through the 
gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; 
some beloved child was being laid away from sight and 
hearing and touch and earthly hope. As I looked about 
the lovely gray spaces I remembered how in La Cathe- 
drale Huysmans says the length symbolizes the pa- 
tience of the Church during trials and persecutions; 
the width, that love which dilates the heart; and the 
height, our aspirations and our hopes — and some speech- 
less gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one 
of the enduring community to whom, through the gor- 
geous, terrible ages, nothing human is foreign. I had 
a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and I 
saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, wind- 
ing through the desert, and the Church compassionate 
the spot of living waters. And how "men must endure 
their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripe- 
ness is all." . . . 

On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and 
on its altar was the figure of a Virgin, and at her feet 
were graven the words, "Virgini Parituri" ("to the 
Virgin who shall bring forth"). And it had come to 
pass. 

The most precious of the old windows have lately 
been put out of harm's way, but the ogival tops remain 
with their jewels of medieval reds and blues; and on 
each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting, 

102 



THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in 
fawn and green and yellow. 

As I came out behind the mourners following the little 
white bier, I noticed again with a sinking of the heart 
the revolutionary defacement of the splendid portals. 
Men in all ages have had seasons of madness, wherein 
they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty 
was within their reach. 

Again through the hot streets — an epic in themselves 
of war, dust, sun, blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, 
gallooned officers, and I realized among other things 
that without uniforms war would be impossible. 

Bought he Champ de Bataille de V Epopee, also he 
Mannequin d' Osier, out of a huge stock of Anatole 
France's books, who is evidently a favorite here. I 
passed through the old courtyard of the museum, her- 
metically sealed depuis la campagne, as the porter told 
me when I sought his lodge, from which the most savory 
of noonday smells was issuing. Uninteresting and en- 
tirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures fill one side 
of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a 
seventeenth-century church, transported there when 
the church itself was being done away with, one finds 
oneself in a narrow passage on the walls of which are 
hung quaint old fire-backs, plaques de foyer. The first 
is of the eighteenth century, li l 'amour desarme" (love was 
nearly always disarmed in those days), and this one 
represented Cupid supporting a languorous lady. "Le 
retour du marche" of Louis XVI depicted a housewife re- 
turning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor 
of the porter's pot-au-feu. A French soldier wounded 
in the Crimea, 1855, with his colonel bending over 
him, might have been any one of a hundred thousand 
scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King 
of Spain, and the date 1608, and on another those of 

io 3 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Maria Theresa and her consort, Francis III, Duke of 
Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the history 
of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting 
about hearths, looking at them through the flames. 

Later. 
Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hos- 
pital. One, nearing sixty, had something ardent in her 
charming blue eyes and under austerely brushed whiten- 
ing hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires — 
banked under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well 
as time. The other, somewhat younger, in the full grip 
of Vdge dangereux, had something inexorable in her re- 
gard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and 
found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devo- 
tion, and then I found myself looking for eternal reasons 
in transient things, under the impression made by those 
two women — met only in passing, but whose emanations 
I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the in- 
numerable phenomena of the war are these women of 
various ages (though the phenomenon is most apparent 
between thirty-five and sixty), brought for the first time 
into personal contact with man, other than father or 
brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, 
awed spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the 
daily transmutations of the definite and ordinary into 
the infinite and divine. The world war gives the one 
chance for the twisting of conventional lives, lived along 
the straightest of lines, into completely unexpected 
shapes. They come from abodes of hitherto unescap- 
able virginities, these elemental women of indescrib- 
able innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or 
sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon 
their faces, these unchosen and unmated, to become 
part of the strange lining of the war, part of the vast 

104 



THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin 
bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, 
heroic. It's a far cry from Shepherd's Bush or Clapham 
Junction or Stepney Green to battle-fields, hospitals, 
vanishings, potent reminders of forces withdrawn for- 
ever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences 
and evocations of returning forces, but not re-established 
order. 

Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of 
the male — his heroisms, his agonies, his needs, his weak- 
ness, and his strength. 

Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless 
natural laws, like other tides, that flood the areas where 
the manhood of the world is concentrated? 

Very hot. Out there in the Champagne Pouilleuse 
men are marching in the white dust, resting in the white 
dust, giving up their lives in the white dust. Am sitting 
under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life a gar- 
dener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its belle 
patine will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I 
sensed such a passion of tenderness in the way he 
handled his rake that I went over to speak to him, and 
this is his history. He is from Cette — une mile si jolie — 
and he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the 
world. He is a territorial and forms part of the litat- 
Civil des Champs de Bataille (civilian workers on the 
battle-fields). This doesn't sound bad, but it really 
means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, 
he, who all his life has planted flowers, has been digging 
up dead bodies, hunting in a literal "body of death" 
to find the plaques, and then identifying by means of 
a map the place where they are found. 

"Madame, je n'en pouvais plus. It was too terrible. 
I am forty-seven years old, but I asked to be put among 
the attacking troops. They refused, but sent me here. 

105 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Now in this garden I have found heaven again." And 
his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears. 

I asked him about his family — one son is fighting in 
the Vosges. 

"He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that 
they call him le roi des Beiges. I lost my daughter a 
few months ago — a beautiful girl with curling blond 
hair. After her fiance fell at Verdun, she went into a 
decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his 
turn is near. I had a beautiful family." The gardener 
himself is straight-featured and straight-browed, caught 
up how terribly in the wine-press of the war. "All my life 
I have been gardener in great houses," he added, with 
a shudder. "The work they gave me la-bas is the most 
terrible of all. On rCy resiste pas d la longue. O les 
pauvres restes qu'on trouve! 0, Madame!" 

I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, 
and his face brightened for a moment as he stood with 
his head uncovered. One speaks to any chance person, 
and immediately one gets a story that is fit only to be 
handled by some master of that incomparable thing, 
French prose. 

Later. 

A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a 
little room toward the north, papered in a yeliow-and- 
white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty years ago. In 
it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the 
top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite 
of the too-large, ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash- 
stand that fills it. Above the mahogany bed is a carved 
wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner for 
books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window 
looking out on small gardens cut up into bits for flowers 
and vegetables. As I entered it I seemed to know that 
some spirit rare and strong enough to project emana- 

106 



THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 

tions, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, 
perhaps died, in it. I settled down immediately in a 
really not comfortable, too-small, brown, upholstered 
arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt somehow as if I 
were in choice company, and began to turn the pages 
of Bordeaux's Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux, which I 
had in my hand as I entered. But something unseen 
held my attention, not the book. The room was gently, 
softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly 
about me. . . . Anyway, the plain of Chalons gives me 
the creeps. 

Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news 
that there had been another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at 
noon, and they had dropped pounds of leaflets telling 
of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger 
of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying 
the Germans were sick of the war — they supposed the 
French were — and why not have peace? 



CHAPTER IV 

THE BURIAL OF PERE CAFARD 

Chalons, Sunday, 2gih. 

TELEGRAM that M. de Sincay may be passing 
through. I would like to see his grand seigneur 
contour decorate our i860 establishment. Go to the 
Bureau de la Place, and nothing less than a general 
(Abbevillers) grasps the receiver and telephones for me 
to Bar-le-Duc — but without result. They are all in 
''our" secteur "of a courtesy"! 

Twelve-o'clock mass at Notre Dame. Again rolling 
music, and the green vestment of the priest especially 
beautiful at the end of that high gray Gothic vista. 
Many, many military. I thought of an English officer 
who said to me not long ago: 

"See how the soldier is exalted in the New Testament. 
It is certainly not the man of law, the money-changer, 
the man of politics, nor governors. When Christ has 
an especial lesson to show, how often He shows it 
through the soldier, even unto the servant of the cen- 
turion." 

On returning, found Mrs. S. and Miss E. arrived from 
the village of the fifteenth-century towers, 1 and the khaki- 
clad sons of Mars from over the seas, their hearts filled 
with patriotism and their tank with American essence. 
Coffee under the chestnut - tree, lovely sun filtering 

1 Gondrecourt, the first American encampment in Lorraine, 
108 



THE BURIAL OF P&RE CAFARD 

through, and the little white butterflies flying about the 
little white ash-tree; and we told stories, being all of 
us souls that laugh, which we did, till we couldn't 
breathe, at the story of the woman's-preparedness 
meeting in a certain transcendental town where the 
head of the assembly in solemn accents besought as 
many as felt drawn to such work to become automobilists 
— "and the moment the Germans set foot in New York 
rush the virgins to the West, preferably Kansas City." 
In the town of brotherly love, where a like assemblage 
was held, an immediate position was available, March, 
191 7, with a commission of major-general, to look after 
dead soldiers' widows for another blinking female. Oh! 
Id, la! — and when one thinks we've got to win the war! 

Later. 

Have just laid down Le Mannequin d 'Osier, completely 
dazzled by that first chapter, so monstrously clever, so 
diabolically lucid, so icily logical, so magnetically cyni- 
cal, and I said to myself, after all, "one can only write 
of war in between wars." I long for a friend to read 
with me the pages where M. Roux, on short leave during 
his years' military service, says to M. Bergeret, "II y a 
quatre mots que je n'ai pas entendu une parole intelli- 
gente," to the paragraph where M. Bergeret says, "Mais 
nous sommes un peuple de heros et nous croyons toujours 
que nous sommes Irakis" It stimulated a desire for the 
discussion of things as they are, over against what one 
idiotically hopes they may be, with a bit of imagination 
concerning the future thrown in. 

July 29th, evening. 

In the afternoon we all went to another theatrical 
representation in the big hall, given by the ier Regiment 
de Marche des Zouaves. Again immense concourse. 

109 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Again the "Marseillaise," and again the Lion d 1 Orient 
made his majestic entry, and dozens of generals and high 
officials followed him, and again all sat forming their 
glittering hemicycle in front of the stage. Again a few 
nurses, some wives of officers, and the thousands of 
poilus. 

A great poster read: "Vous §tes prtis d'assister au 
convoi, service, et enterrement du Pire Cafard, assassine 
par le Communique". 

' ' Le deuil sera conduit par le Pinard, le Jus, la Gniole, 
le Tabac, et tous les tembres du Chacal hurlant." 

It appears that those of the ist Zouaves still in hos- 
pital had had a rise in temperature at the thought that 
their representation might not equal that of the Moroccan 
Division of Friday. The Compere was made to look as 
much as possible like Colonel Rolland — adored by his 
men. "On Kmet Ca!" has been given in the trenches 
all over the front, and was just as funny and amusing 
as the other, but there was a strange intermezzo about 
three o'clock, when the dreadful sun, shining through 
the glass panes of the sides (on the roof great squares of 
canvas had been spread), began to get fainter. It was"' 
like being in the hot -room of a Turkish bath. Sud- 
denly a darkness fell, accompanied by a deafening and 
terrifying noise of a heavy rattling on the roof and a 
beating in at the sides; the voices and music were 
completely drowned and the performance had to be 
suspended. Even the officers were beginning to look 
about — when the lights suddenly went out and we found 
ourselves in Stygian blackness at 4.30 of a summer 
afternoon, the terrific noise continuing, with the under- 
note of the stirring of the thousands assembled. A 
nameless fear, or something akin to it, went through 
the vast assemblage. Finally we realized that it was 
heaven, not the enemy, bombarding us, as hailstones, 

no 



THE BURIAL OF P&RE CAFARD 

even by the time they had gone through many hot hands, 
as big as turkey eggs, were passed about. There was 
the sound of breaking glass, water began to rush in, the 
heavy canvas, spread on the roof as protection against 
the sun, and also to prevent the light from being seen 
from the air, alone prevented the roof from breaking in. 
Finally the lights reappeared and the performance pro- 
ceeded to the diminishing sound of heavy rain — but it 
was a strange experience. Even those generals of Olym- 
pic calm had begun to "think thoughts" at one mo- 
ment. It would have been a big "bag," had anything 
been doing, and we all knew it. 

Mrs. S. and Miss E. have been persuaded to stay at 
the house by the Marne, rather than at La Haute Mere 
Dieu, and we have arranged to double up. 

I am to motor back to Paris with them to-morrow. 



CHAPTER V 

A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 

Paris, July 31st. 

YESTERDAY, at 8.30 in the damp morning, Lieu- 
tenant Robin appeared with my military pass to 
return by auto instead of by train, and I said a special 
farewell to the gardener, carrying our bags out to the 
motor in a passionate tenderness of courtesy. Miss 
Nott and Miss Mitchell bade us Godspeed, and we 
passed over the Marne and out of town. At the con- 
signe examination of our papers, our charming chauffeuse 
excited much attention. An officer standing there with 
pasteboard box and leather bag asked if we would give 
him a lift. The road was unusually empty and he had 
been awaiting an act of Providence for two hours. We 
were it. 

He would be in ordinary times a Frenchman of the 
stereotyped banal sort, and he was entirely without 
charm, though I dare say he is known as a beau gargon 
in Lyons, where before the war he was marchand de 
bois. But the war transmutes everything it touches, 
and he, too, had undergone the subtle change. He said, 
quite simply for a man naturally fatuous, "Je ne re- 
trouverai jamais ma vie d 'autre fois." I seemed to see 
what that life had been. Small but good business trans- 
actions; some success with women, as I said he would 
be considered as handsome; the theater; reading news- 

112 



A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 

papers in a cafe; talking of the happenings of his quar- 
ter of the town — and the lamp of his soul burning only 
dimly. But even he has been caught up in the "chariot 
that rides the ridges " and must partake of la haine et tous 
ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes. We drop him at a 
crossroad and he takes a muddy side-path to the village 
where his regiment is billeted. 

At another crossway just out of the village of Vertus 
another officer was waiting. We called out, "Is this 
the road to Epernay?" And then, "Do you want a 
lift?" This time it was a dark-eyed young man with 
a kindling glance and something responsive and mer- 
curial in his being, giving a sensation of personality, 
awake, running, a-thrill. He had twenty-four hours' per- 
mission to go to Paris to see his mother, and had arrived 
to see the train pulling out of the little station. He 
also was waiting Fate at the crossroads, and crossroads 
in war-time are a favorite abode of Fate. He had been 
wounded near Suippes, lay twenty-four hours in a shell- 
hole, and was finally brought in by some man he didn't 
know, whose head was blown off as he was pulling him 
into the trench. Something deep rustled in my heart 
at the vision of the splendor of that anonymity. Six 
months in hospital, six months of convalescing, and then 
a hunger for the front — quorum pars fuit. 

We were passing through a beautiful country of vine- 
yards, Vertus, Mesnil, Avize, in the loveliness of graded 
greens, malachite, beryl, emerald, jasper, and stretches 
of aquamarine where the grapes had been powdered 
with the melange de Bordeaux. Everywhere were little 
sharp, steep hills, their plantings taking all kinds of 
lights as they turned to east or west or south. 

At Epernay we wound about the streets till we came 
to the Hotel de l'Emope, marked with a star in the guide ; 
but you see no stars when you get into its encumbered, 

113 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

dull little courtyard — as slightly modern as possible — 
ask for luncheon, any kind of luncheon, and find one 
can't have it or anything till twelve, the only fixed 
thing, except the consigne, I have discovered in the war 
zone. We went across the square to the Cafe de la 
Place, where we had ceufs sur le plat, a yard and a half 
of thin, crusty bread, a thick pat of yellow butter, and a 
bottle of Chablis, that poured out pinky into our glasses. 
After which, reinforced and most cheerful, we went to 
the Place du Marche, where were many signs of the cam- 
paign of August and September, 1914. Among debris 
of bombarded buildings the fruit-market was being 
held. Plums, peaches, and apricots were of the most 
delicious, and we got pounds of them, which later were 
to be smashed and mashed and to ruin our dressing- 
bags and our clothes and the motor seats as we bumped 
along. It all came from Paris except the tiny, sweet, 
white grapes. 

Epernay seems banal, driving through it, but if one 
thinks a bit, all sorts of things flash into the mind. It 
has a Merovingian past, and has been pillaged innu- 
merable times by innumerable hosts. It belonged to the 
Counts of Champagne, to Louise of Savoy; Henry IV 
lesieged it in person, and Marechal de Biron fell by his 
side. Now thinking of its great champagne industry, 
into mind come memories of dinner-tables around which 
sat white-vested, decorated statesmen, even unto the 
kind that did not prevent war, and lovely women, 
and the toss of repartee, and flash of jewel and white 
throat, and all the once-accustomed things no longer 
ours. 

As we got out of Epernay a terrible temptation as- 
sailed us. Three law-abiding women, by reason of 
original sin, I suppose, were drawn to take the forbidden 
road to Reims — Reims, the scarred, the pitiful — Reims, 

114 



A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 

whose cannon sounded even now in our ears — rather 
than the straight path of duty and sauf-conduits to 
Paris. 

"After all, we're not here to go joy-riding in the war 
zone," said one, virtuously; and then prudence, most 
dismal of virtues, triumphed, bolstered up by a look 
at a well-guarded bridge, and I told the inspiring story 
of the principal of the school my mother went to, whose 
last words to every graduate class were, "What is duty, 
young ladies?" And the young ladies were expected to 
respond, "A well-spring in the soul." It isn't (and 
never has been), and our eyes kept sweeping the hill 
between the Epernay road and that great plain of Cham- 
pagne in the midst of which is set the broken jewel of 
France. A military auto passed as we stood there, and 
an officer waved us onward. We let that hand pointing 
us to Paris decide. It was the triumph of prudence — ■ 
plus a lively sense of favors to come. Some one mut- 
tered, "Had we been going to take the boat on Saturday, 
oh, then mayhap, mayhap ..." 

Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dor- 
mans little crosses began to show themselves along the 
roadside. All through here was heavy fighting during 
the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by 
bore on its little cross the words, "Trois Allemands," 
and it was neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. 
We started to climb the hill, and among the malachite, 
the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and the aquamarine 
vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be 
"20 Frangais," the red-and-white-and-blue cocarde 
decorating the cross. Once it was "30 Allemands." 
On another was the name "Lastaud, le 3 septembre, 
1 91 4, souvenir d'un ami. 1 ' I thought how friendship has 
been glorified in this war. 

But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity 

US 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

of the defenders of the land that clutched the heart 
and with them the invaders, pressing their bayonets 
and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once more 
again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked 
at these resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the 
hill and the forest was Montmirail. Just a hundred 
years before, Napoleon had put these names upon the 
scrolls of history, and again and then again they had 
resounded to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the 
heroisms of defense. One of a group of soldiers passing 
called out as we stood by one of the German graves: 

"I came through here in 19 14." 

"But you still walk the earth," I answered. 

"I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of 
that hill," and he pointed across the road. "Mais fai 
eu de la chance." And a look of a strange and pitiful 
wonder that he was above the earth, not under it, 
flashed for a moment over his young face; then he 
touched his cap and went singing down the road with 
his companions, and I caught the refrain, "Ces mots 
sacres, ces mots sacres, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie." 

And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I 
only remember long, gray villages, mostly eighteenth 
century, and many blue soldiers walking about their 
broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, "30 
hommes, 2 officiers," "5 hommes, 2 chevaux," black-robed 
women coming out of little Gothic churches, and children 
playing, and in between the villages great avenues of 
poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne and 
picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferte, and Meaux, 
seen from the inside, preserved its flavor of "autres temps, 
autre s mozurs" in spite of the 191 7 soldiers billeted there, 
walking hand in hand with girls who don't have a ghost 
of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war 
as they began it. 

116 



A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 

Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our 
charming chauffeuse dead tired after the long day, but 
steering us so prudently and yet so quickly through 
the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman 
chauffeur any day! — not simply when coming from the 
front! She takes no chances, but she makes good time 
and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves one's 
heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to 
the hotel door, "It's not so good, after all, to feel just 
safe and to be comfortable." 

9 



PART III 

LORRAINE IN AUTUMN 

"UtUgante et mtlancolique Lorraine' 



CHAPTER I 

NANCY AND MOLITOR 

i.jo p.m., Tuesday, October glh. 

PASSING Meaux. Square gray tower of its cathedral 
against a gray sky, the gray hemicycle of its lovely 
apse cutting in against reddish-gray roofs; gray houses 
with old towers built into them; yellowing acacia and 
plane and willow trees; level corn-fields stripped of 
their harvest, pheasants and magpies pecking in them; 
golden pumpkins; and better aves showing red and ver- 
milion roots bursting out of the ground; everything 
wet — wet. 

Ligny-en-Barrois. 

Two American soldiers walking up a muddy village 
street in the dusk; rain falling; a cinnamon-colored 
stream slipping by; and a quantity of shabby, wet 
foliage and wetter meadows. 

GONDRECOURT, 5.40. 

In the extreme point of the angle where the Nancy 
train seems to turn back to Paris and where many 
American soldiers are billeted. Cheerless, dimly lighted 
station. Groups of our men standing about, high piles 
of United States boxes, marked "Wizard Oats." Some 
persuasion of black-frock-coated "sky pilot" walking 
up and down and humming, "Pull for the shore, sailor, 
pull for the shore" (there was a lot of water about!), 
and then in the darkness the train slipped out. There 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

and in all the dim, wet Lorraine villages about are damp, 
puzzled, homesick, forlorn, brave, determined, eager 
young Americans. 

H6tel Excelsior et d'Angleterre, 

Nancy, Tuesday evening. 

Cabs at station, hot water, writing-paper, meat, 
warmth, all sorts of things you don't always get on Tues- 
day in Paris. Everything, in fact, except light. Din- 
ing-room full of officers. Chic atmosphere de guerre be- 
gan to envelope me, not yet experienced that day. 
Started from Paris tired and not particularly receptive, 
but was conscious of a slow quickening of sensibility as 
the hours passed, drawing me within the zone of armies. 

This "chic war atmosphere" is like nothing else. 
Impersonal and larger lungs are needed to breathe it. 
We no longer, so many of us, read of their battles, but 
they still fight them, these blue-clad men out here. In 
the coal-black evening, stumbling from the station, one 
realizes it all once more — and there is some lighting of 
the soul. 

October ioth. 

Nancy in rain and storm, and all night the sound of 
cannon and gun and mitrailleuse turned against sweet 
flesh and blood, the sons of women dying in agony hard 
as their mother's pain, and no way out. Never were the 
imaginations of men less elastic; little groups every- 
where are hourly setting this cold grind in motion with 
a word or a gesture, around green tables or bending 
over maps — in a few small spaces deciding the agonies 
of millions. 

An avion almost tapped at my window once toward 
morning and reminded me of a young aviator with 
whom we talked in the train last night, his face a-twitch, 
strange eyes, gloomy, set mouth, once jeunesse doree. 
A hard look as he answered : 

122 



NANCY AND MOLITOR 

"Avion de chasse, il riy a que cela." He had been 
"resting" in the cavalry, where there was little move- 
ment, and he couldn't stand it. As for the trenches — 

"O les tranche" es! Etre avec des gens que je ne connais 
pas, sous des conditions indescriptibles; non, je n'en peux 
plus." 

"Better to fall from the heavens?" I asked him. 

And then I realized the disarray of nerves, the com- 
plete unfitting of the being to an earthly habitat, in the 
knowledge that life is measured by an almost countable 
number of hours or days, scarcely weeks, and rarely, 
rarely months, and the calling on help from the flower 
of sleep to fit one for acts impossible to normal being. 

I must say this very evidently "made-in-Germany" 
hotel is most comfortable. Jugend-Stil designed bed, 
exquisitely clean ; great white eiderdown ; a munificence 
of brass electric-light fixtures representing leaves, with 
frosted shades running from pale pink to pale green, 
and giving plenty of light; the iron shutters tightly 
pulled down, of course. Large wash-stand with a huge 
faucet for hot water, bearing the name "Jacob"; the 
heating apparatus by Ruckstuhl; the telephone, "Ber- 
liner-system"; electric light and lift the familiar 
"Schindler." Wardrobe and mirror over wash-stand 
have, like the bed, a design, not of conventionalized 
flowers, but of flowers devoid of life. The inexpressibly 
sloppy mollesse of art nouveau is in such contrast to the 
beautiful precision of touch of the eighteenth century. 

At 9.30 E. M.came into my room and said, "We'd bet- 
ter doll up and be off." I leave it to the gentlest of 
readers to surmise what we did before being off, and I 
would like to say here that one doesn't always "doll 
up" for others; the process gives to one's own being a 
sense of completeness most sustaining. It comes after 
that of having one's clothes put on properly. 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

En route to the Prefect's we met the tall, good-looking 
blond young son of Jean de Reszke, ' ' ires chic, cher chant 
le danger"; ' ' en voila un qui n'a pas froid aux yeux," the 
only and adored child of his parents. It's not a very 
promising situation for them. But again I thought, 
"Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he play 
his part well," and started to ponder on the incalculable 
growth of filial piety, and of the love of mothers, and 
their griefs, when, suddenly walking along the gray 
streets of Nancy, the scene shifted, and it was the 
Metropolitan Opera House that I saw — the lights, the 
red glow, the boxes, the jewels; the warmth, the stir 
of the orchestra, the quiet of the listening house, were 
about me. It seemed to be the second act of "Tristan 
and Isolde" after the duo, when King Mark makes his 
noble entry and in those unforgetable accents begins 
his broken-hearted apostrophe to Tristan, "Tatest du's in 
Wirklichkeit, wahnst du das?" And all that unsur- 
passed and unsurpassable art of the great Polish brothers 
was again evoked ; one now gathered to his rest in stress 
of war, the other knowing a greater fear than for him- 
self. 

Then I found myself in the Place Stanislas under 
gray morning skies, instead of the gleaming twilight 
web. I felt suddenly and acutely the turning of the 
seasons and the inexorable advent of winter through 
which unsheltered flesh and blood must pass. That 
ravishing of the spirit I knew in the warm June sunset 
was mine no more. 

Later. 
Waiting for the motor to drive to Lun6ville. 

Went with Madame Mirman, the wife of the Pre Jet 
de la Meurthe et Moselle, to visit Molitor. It is a huge 
collection of barrack-buildings which for three years 
has contained that terrible precipitation of old men, 

124 




SISTER JULIE 




BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES 

As they passed at Evian— but typical of any group anywhere. 



NANCY AND MOLITOR 

women, and children from the devastated districts 
around about. They are received in every conceivable 
condition of hunger, dirt, disease, and distress of soul. 
They had been living in the woods and fields that first 
summer, and the children running the streets of half- 
ruined towns, before being brought to Molitor. 

We went first to the school-building, and into the 
kindergarten room where rows of children were making 
straight lines with beans on little tables. Very hot and 
stuffy in the hermetically sealed room, every child snif- 
fling and sneezing and coughing. There are always 
faces that stand out, and in this room, as the children 
rose and sang a song with patting of the hands, there 
was one child of five with gestures so lovely and move- 
ments of the body so rhythmic that one realized afresh 
the eternal differences in the seasoning of the human 
pdte. She was between two clumsy, wooden-faced chil- 
dren, one with a peaked forehead, the other with a heavy 
jaw. 

We then went up-stairs to a class-room of older boys, 
and after we had spoken to the schoolmaster I noticed 
a handsome boy with shining eyes and a firm mouth. 
The master, who was new and wished to become ac- 
quainted with his pupils, had written the following ques- 
tions on the blackboard: ''Whence do you come? 
What was the occupation of your parents? Are you 
happy at Molitor?" etc. Well, that little boy of eleven, 
when asked what he had written, turned out to be a 
sort of cross between Demosthenes and Gambetta, and 
read from his slate an impassioned apostrophe about 
' ' le flot envahisseur des barbares, quand delivrera-t-on la 
France martyrise" e de la main destructrice de I'ennemi? " 
and to the question, "Are you happy at Molitor?" the 
answer was, "Out, on est bien a Molitor, mais rien ne 
remplace le foyer; quand on a perdu cela, on a tout perdu." 

125 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

The face of the master showed some embarrassment 
at any restrictions on happiness at Molitor, but the 
boy, whose eyes had begun to flame, continued: "O 
quand viendra le jour de la Revanche, le jour sacre de la 
delivrance?" and wound up with something about his 
blood and the blood of his children. His father, who 
was dead, had been employed in the customs at Avri- 
court, and his mother now cooked in one of the Molitor 
buildings. Then we passed through a room where 
some fifty women were sorting and stemming hops ; the 
strong, warm odor enveloped us and the eyes of the 
women followed us. 

Then out across the immense courtyard to one of the 
dormitory buildings. Rows of beds, and above them, 
around the walls, a line of shelves on which is every 
kind of small article that could be carried in flight, from 
trimmings for Christmas trees to shrines and little 
strong-boxes. 

As we entered the first room, Madame Mirman said 
to an old woman with deep, soft eyes: 

''Comment ga va-t-il aujourd'hui?" 

And with such grace she answered: 

"Oh, Madame, c'est la vieillesse, et on Wen guerit pas." 

Another woman, nursing a rheumatic knee, when 
asked about her son, who had been at Molitor on a 
three days' permission, put her cracked old hand over 
her heart and said, ' ' Voir un peu sa personne fait oublier 
tout" 

In all the big rooms near the long windows women 
sit bent over embroidery and passementerie frames. 
One of them, with thin hair and horny hands, was work- 
ing with extreme rapidity on a bright paillete strip for 
an evening gown, a design of silver lilies on white tulle, 
in such contrast to her worn face and bent figure. 

Many were working at lovely and intricate tea- 

126 



NANCY AND MOLITOR 

cloths, with designs of the Lorraine cross, and 
thistle, oak and acorn designs, that had been handed 
down through generations. Some of the work Madame 
Mirman is able to dispose of directly, while some is 
contracted for with big shops. 

When we came down-stairs there was a great sound 
of young feet and voices and various noises of well- 
cared-for children, just dismissed from the seats of 
learning, coming up the stone stairway to their dinner. 

It's the threading up of all these destinies, this web 
of the France to be, that is the great problem. And 
oh, how terrible is this uptearing of human beings, this 
ghastly showing of the roots! I have seen it wholesale, 
east and west. I remember especially the first two 
evacuations of Czernowitz and the adjacent towns and 
villages during the Russian advance through Galicia. 
They would flood the streets of Vienna by the tens of 
thousands, in pitiful groups, always the same — old men, 
women, and children; and it's all alike, it's war, the 
ruthless, the indescribable, and everywhere the children 
paying most heavily. Could the war-book of children 
be written no eyes could read it for tears. . . , 1 

We went back to luncheon at the Prefecture, where I 
met M. Mirman, one of the most striking figures of the 
war. Since the 12th of August, 19 14, when he took 
up his duties as Prefet de la Meurthe et Moselle, his hand- 
some, straight-featured face has figured at every gather- 
ing of sorrow or relief. As he sat at his table, surrounded 
by his six children, he talked of those first days when 
Nancy was in danger and it was not known if le Grand 

1 During the closing days of February, 19 18, the air raids on Nancy 
were so continuous and so disastrous that Molitor had to be evacuated 
and the inmates, the aged and the children, were redistributed in other 
parts of France. These words are quite simple to write and to read. 
Their significance is beyond expression. 

March, 1918, E. O'S. 
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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Couronn6 on which Castelnau had flung his paraphe 
could protect them, and then he told of many urgent 
present needs. 

After lunch we drove with Madame Mirman to her 
favorite good work, Vecole menagere. 

When we got there the elementary class, girls of thir- 
teen to fourteen, were chopping herbs and onions to 
make seasoning for soups in winter, and putting it up 
in stone pots. Another class was kneading and rolling 
out dough. Then we went into the great sewing-room 
and turned over the books of miniature sample pieces 
of underclothing. When the girls become expert they 
are given material and make their own trousseaux. 

With a sigh Madame Mirman said: "But I am sad 
for these girls. The men who might have been their 
husbands lie dead on the field of honor, and there will 
be no homes for them." 

Something chill and inexorable laid its hand on me as 
I thought : only graves, and they leveled out of memory 
by time; except in the hearts of mothers, to whom voir 
un peu sa personne is the supreme joy, and the knowl- 
edge that it can be no more the supreme sorrow. 

H6tel des Vosges, Luneville, 11.30 p.m. 
A long day. Many pages of the book of life and 
death turned. Just before leaving Nancy, made a little 
tour of the battered station. Scarcely a pane of glass 
left anywhere, but in and out of it is the ceaseless move- 
ment of blue-clad men. A few flecks of a strange, dull 
amber in a pale-pink sky, the true sunset sky of Nancy. 
A bishop with a military cap and a chaplain in khaki 
pass, lines of camions and Red Cross ambulances. Sud- 
denly, beyond the station, a dark-winged thing against 
the sky is seen to drop, right itself for a moment, then 
a column of smoke goes up from it, then a flame, then 

128 



NANCY AND MOLITOR 

there is a falling of something black just behind the twin 
Gothic towers of St. -Leon. The streets filled instantly, 
"C'est un des notres," said a man with field-glasses, 
and then, death in the sky not being unusual here, they 
went about their business, and the long, delicate towers 
of St. -Leon got black as ink against the flaming sky. 
But a man's soul was being breathed out in some dis- 
tant beet-root field or in the forest of Haye. Peace to 
him! 

The next thing I saw, that has become a familiar sight 
in the last months, was an American soldier on some sort 
of permission, and hanging from his arm, neatly bound, 
was a pretty little "dictionary" — from whom, however, 
came sounds of broken English. The British Expedi- 
tionary Force saved the classics from destruction at one 
time; now "salvage" seems to be rather the turn of 
the American forces. One can only philosophize on the 
indestructibility of matter. 

The Place Stanislas was a bit out of our way, but when 
I saw the lovely Louis XV knots of pink that the orb 
of day was tying in the sky before he quite departed 
I begged for three minutes in its pale loveliness. Against 
the delicate ribbons of the sky were urns and figures, 
urns with stone flames arising from them, softly glowing, 
or stone flower-twisted torches held by winged beings, 
children and youths or angels I knew not — but I did 
know in a flash just how and why the Place Stanislas 
came into being. 

In the gray streets were blue-clad, heavily laden men, 
and the chill autumn twilight was falling about them. 
Oh, Nancy! dream of the past and yet with so much 
of the hope of the present within your gates ! 

As we sped out of town, through the vast manufactur- 
ing suburbs, I turned and saw a bank of orange glory 
in the west, cut into browns and reds, with little thread- 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

ings of gray and green and blue, for all the world like 
an ancient Cashmere shawl with light thrown on it. 

Night was falling as we passed through St. -Nicolas du 
Port. The two immense towers of the church, which 
dominate the landscape, were cutting black and cypress- 
like into the sky. The streets were full of dim figures — 
soldiers, overalled men, and many trousered women 
coming from munition-factories, with baskets and cling- 
ing children, hurrying home to get the evening meal. 

We two American women found ourselves threading 
our way through it all in a Ford which E. M. was 
driving herself, the Ford which in the afternoon had 
allowed itself caprices only permissible to lovelier ob- 
jects, and there, close behind the French lines, we talked 
of love and marriage, and the Church. And these things 
had been and are for one, and for the other all to come. 

Among its various imperfections, the Ford was one- 
eyed, and our little light did not cast its beams very far. 
We got tangled up into a long line of camions, with 
blinding headlights, quite extinguishing us as we hugged 
the right side of the road. Finally we reached the out- 
post of Luneville, where the guard stopped us, dark and 
disreputable-looking as we were, flashed his lantern, 
saw the lettering on the auto. We cried, "Vitrimont," 
and then passed on. The chill night had completely 
fallen, but in the dark fields rose darker crosses that 
only one's soul could see. Peace to them that lie be- 
neath! 

Into town safe; drew up at the door of the house 
that was once an old Capuchin monastery, groped our 
way through a dark garden to find a warm welcome from 
Mademoiselle Guerin, a shining tea-table, an open fire, 
many books* things seemed too well with us. 



CHAPTER II 

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

October nth, 7.30. 

AWAKENED at five o'clock to the sound of cavalry 
1 passing under my windows. I have three, and 
got the full benefit of the hoofs. I looked out into a 
bluish, late-night sky; endless shadowy lines of men 
that I knew were blue-clad were defiling, and there was 
a faint booming of cannon. Everything that the pitchy 
blackness of the streets of Luneville prevents the in- 
habitants from doing between 5 and 8 p.m. they do be- 
tween 5 and 8 a.m. The hour was set back on the 7th, 
which is why we have suddenly so much morning and 
these chopped-off afternoons. It makes the streets of 
the old town "hum" in the early hours. No Taubes; 
the sky too threatening. Again chic atmosphere de guerre. 

My big room is charming. The doors have panelings 
of the great epoch of Luneville, but on the walls is a 
fresh papering of a pinkish toile de Jouy design, in such 
good taste, an abyss between it and the Jugend-Stil of 
the "H6tel Excelsior et d'Angleterre"; over each door 
is a lunette containing a faded old painting. 

The pink-curtained windows have deep embrasures; 
a fresh, thick, pale-gray carpet quite covers the floor; 
on the mantelpiece is a bronze clock, a large Europa 
sitting on a small bull. I suspect it is 1830. In one 
corner a commodious Louis XV armoire. On one of 

131 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

its doors is carved a peasant's house and a hunter aim- 
ing at a deer half-hidden in some trees. On the other 
is a fishing scene and a bridge, and in the distance a 
chateau. The panels are inclosed in charming Pompa- 
dour scrolls, and there is an elaborate wrought-iron 
lock of the same period. It seemed to epitomize the 
life of Lorraine, as well as "the reign of the arts and 
talents." Discovered last night that the electric light 
is in the right place, so that a lady can dress for dinner 
or read in bed with equal facility. There is all the hot 
water one could wish, an open fireplace, but it was with 
a sigh that I said, as I heard the cannon, "Rien ne 
manque." The maid, who had been in England, put 
our things out last night with a dainty touch, the rib- 
bons on top; my pink satin neglige was placed with 
art across the chair by my bed. In E. M.'s room, 
equally comfortable, her pale-blue one was also taste- 
fully displayed. Somehow, all the physical comfort is 
so insistently in contrast with what is being gone through 
with a few kilometers away, and though my soul can 
be supremely content without any of it, I looked for 
the moment with a new appreciation on this flicker of 
comfort behind that dreadful front. 

Again we groped through the Place Leopold after din- 
ner at Mile. Guerin's, feeling our way slowly under com- 
pletely remote stars, Jupiter so gorgeous that for a mo- 
ment my heart was afraid. Then I became sensible of 
ghostly and lovely companions, the amiable secrets of 
whose amiable lives have been revealed to me in many 
a tome since I crossed that square in those linden- 
scented nights of June. Did linden scent, on which a 
long chapter could be written, have anything to do with 
their morals, I wonder? However that may be, I 
thought of Duke Leopold going from the chateau through 
the park to the house in the rue de Lorraine to see the 

132 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

Princesse de Craon, who bore twenty children here in 
Luneville, preserving her beauty and her husband's 
love, and that of Duke Leopold as well, evidently having 
the secret of squaring the circle without breaking it 
(unknown in the twentieth century, when everything 
"goes bang" if it is but breathed upon). Then of the 
wild and witty Chevalier de Boufners, painting and 
making verses, loving and forgetting, whose mother, 
beloved of ' 'Stanislas, Roi de Pologne et Due de Lorraine 
et de Bar," was the bright particular star of Stanislas's 
Court, as his grandmother had been of Leopold's. And 
how often La divine Emilie and Voltaire passed through 
the Place Leopold in their coach to be put up at the 
Palace and contribute to the gaiety of nations. They 
and many others filled the square, and I was thinking 
of discreet sedan-chairs coming from rendezvous rather 
than of the uncompromised and uncompromising lamp- 
post that finally got me, minus the light. 

Now I quite dislike getting up from this literally 
downy couch, with its dainty pink-lined, lace-trimmed, 
white-muslin covered eiderdown and its heaps of soft 
pillows, to investigate further their amours, and in 
general the arts et talents of the eighteenth century, but 
so I willed it, and so it must be done. For some reason 
nervous energy is at a low ebb. There are moments 
when I throw my life out of the window, when nothing 
seems impossible and most things quite easy, but to-day 
the gray world outside, VeUgante et melancolique Lorraine, 
I would consider well lost for converse with a beloved 
friend by my fireside. 

October 12th. 

Nothing to be found in Luneville on an October night 

except your soul, and if you don't keep it fairly bright, 

you won't find even that. Oh, woe is me! about six 

o'clock mine was suddenly too dark and sad for words, 

10 133 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

so I betook me to the downy couch of the morning, 
with a batch of letters and various books given me by 
M. Guerin at lunch, some old, some new, concern- 
ing V elegante et melancolique Lorraine. The Hotel des 
Vosges is ahead of any Ritz that was ever built, and, 
what's more, in it your soul's your own, even if it is 
a poor and dark and trembling thing. 

My "Symphonic Pastorale" letter to — — returned 
to me. Have just reread it and pinned it into the 
Journal. It's all part of the same. 

Aix-les-Bains, vendredi, 27 aodt, 1917. 

. . . The orchestra, pale, emasculated, having the mini- 
mum of strings — the musicians of France are dead or 
in the trenches — seemed without accent during the first 
part of the program. "La Chasse du Jeune Henri" of 
Mehul, "Les Eolides" of Cesar Franck, something of 
Gretry, Dukas, Saint-Saens, enfin, one of the usual war- 
time programs. But then followed the "Symphonie 
Pastorale" and the master's voice suddenly swelled the 
thin sounds, triumphant in the beauty of his order and 
splendor. 

A. — {Sensations agreables en arrivant a la Campagne. 
Allegro ma non troppo.) I felt myself invaded by a 
familiar but long-untasted delight as my ear received the 
gorgeous consonances, and the lovely theme of the vio- 
lins drew me to an interior place. My fancy was set 
a- wandering in a world of green glades, and broad 
meadows covered with asphodel and belladonna and 
fringed by dark plantings of pines, such as the master 
had wandered in, and "upon my eyes there lay a tear 
the dream had loosened from my brain." In deep 
serenity I found myself thinking on appearances of 
"things wise and fair," feeling myself in some way in- 
cluded in a company of paradisaical beings. 

i34 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation 
succeeded the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful 
scene, like to the lunar landscape of the battle-field of 
Verdun, and I knew that my dwelling-place was a world 
of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the invading hor- 
ror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling 
of suffocation clutched my throat, and a something 
burning wrapped my soul. Delight was dead. 

B. — (Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto.) 
The master spoke again, in a voice of purling water over 
smooth stones and through soft grasses; the music of 
the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my 
fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the 
beauty of the exterior world tried to communicate it- 
self to me. But my eyes fell on a white-haired man 
seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or 
dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a 
start and groan, and was doubtless thinking on combat 
and empty places and "heroes struggling with heroes 
and above them the wrathful gods." 

And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and name- 
less sacrifices and children at evening and silent fire- 
sides, and broken loves and other visible and invisible 
things. 

C. — (Joyeuse reunion de Paysans. Allegro.) Express- 
ing the master's deep belief in the goodness of human- 
ity, its deathless adorations, its inextinguishable hopes. 

But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here 
in Savoy, and husbands and fathers and sons will cross 
their thresholds no more. "The ancients have ceased 
from the gates, the young men from the choir of the 
singers." 

I sat by the stream among the peasants and remem- 
bered suddenly two combatants, an Austrian and a 
Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that first winter of 

i35 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen 
log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the 
ground, and when he was brought in they were black 
and swollen, and as I saw him he was but a trunk of a 
man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with 
something wild and burning in his look, and restless 
hands, had fallen with his feet in a stream, and he, too, 
would walk no more; and so one thinks of brooks and 
sweet, moving waters these days. 

{Orage — Tempete. Allegro.) The sudden D flat, the 
world in noise and horror and protesting hate, and hard, 
bright-eyed men meeting from East and West, the sons 
of the world falling for the sins of the world; and 
there is no way out, for all words save that of peace 
may be spoken. And I thought on the loneliness of the 
mind, and knew it for as great or greater than that 
of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal 
throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these 
are of such abundance that there are always contacts. 
But the loneliness of the mind is a world where there is 
scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices call, and 
sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to 
you to-night. 

I listened again. (Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance 
aprks V orage. Allegretto.) And I suddenly realized how 
unsubstantial, for all their thickness, are the towers 
wherein each dwells isolated from some near happiness, 
shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving 
touch might be his own. And I found that the com- 
pleted harmonies of the lovely finale, "Herr, wir danken 
Dir," were seeking my mortal ear, and my soul was being 
regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from un- 
timely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life 
who go up to battle, and from all the company of those 
who "have wrapped about themselves the blue-black 

136 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

cloud of death," and I saw again visions, felicities, pro- 
gressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less 
beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with 
lovely, veiled, outcast, undesired Peace, accompanied 
me through the warm Savoyan night. But they left 
me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed con- 
cierge saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols 
of my real world) took me up-stairs. Now I am alone 
with thoughts of him who gave to melody its eternal 
fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would 
that you had listened with me ! . . . You who wiM not, 
Peace! . . . 

M. Guerin's book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, en 
permission, with a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel 

, and several other men. Mr. G., whose family have 

been part owners of the Luneville porcelain-factories for 
one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and 
afterward, over our coffee by his library fire, we talked 
politics and literature and music. I had just been read- 
ing Madame de StaeTs De VAllemagne, not at all in 
favor just now, which I had picked up on her cen- 
tenary. 

"Une exaltee," said one of the officers. 

"That is not enough to say of one who always had 
the courage of her convictions," I answered, and recalled 
the conversation between her and Benjamin Constant 
when under the Consulate he threw himself into the 
opposition. 

"Voila," he said, "votre salon rernpli de personnes qui 
vous plaisent; si je parle demain, il sera desert; pensez-y." l 

And she answered, "II faut suivre sa conviction.' 1 

' ' She certainly followed out her convictions ; but what 

1 She received ten refusals for the dinner she was giving the next night; 
among them one from Talleyrand, which caused a permanent rupture in 
their relations. 

137 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

did Madame de Stael know of the Germans?" pursued 
the colonel. "She saw them in the quite factitious 
setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by 
the play of mind. Those beaux e sprits presented the 
character and the future of their race, through rose- 
colored clouds of Romanticism, to one of the most 
charming and gifted women another race had ever pro- 
duced, et puis elle rentre et elle ecrit de V Allemagne! 
Cela serait comique si ce n'etait pas si triste." 

"Don't you think both sides played up," I asked, 
"at those Weimar suppers? She was under the charm 
of philosophers and musicians, and they under the 
charm of her wit and appreciation. I keep thinking 
how they all enjoyed it — and how those black eyes 
flashed under the heavy red-and-gold turban." 

"Without doubt it was more than agreeable. I only 
complain that she was in a position to mislead succeed- 
ing generations, and did so. She seems to have had no 
flair, and because she got the personal enthusiasm, the 
hot striking of mind against mind, that was at once her 
gift and her delight, she glorifies a nation that later 
makes furious attempts to destroy hers." 

I then remarked, but a bit warily: "Talking of 
centenaries, I have just had in my hands the discourse 
of Wagner on the centenary of Beethoven. It has fire." 

"We won't talk of Wagner, the mere memory of a 
phrase scorches one's ear. Beethoven, yes, for all time, 
but we French can't listen to Wagner now. He's like 
a hot iron on seared flesh — or a rake in a wound. We 
want nothing more to do with the Lohengrins and the 
Tannhausers and the Siegfrieds. I only wish they had 
been annihilated with their Walhalla." 

"These beings, however, were potential in the Ger- 
man race. Madame de Stael got their projections, to- 
gether with the metaphysics of Goethe and his con- 

138 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

temporaries, and carried away with her the memory of 
a blue-eyed people lost in metaphysical dreams, passion- 
ately loving poetry and music." 

"Yes, and presented them to us as an example of all 
the social virtues. Look at history," said another officer, 
with a gesture toward the east. 

One can talk of other things besides the booming of 
cannon, even in Luneville — but not with complete 
pleasure. 

Then E. M. and I departed to take a tournee about 
the country. But the Ford reposing in the Guerins' 
garage was completely unresponsive ; it might have been 
dead. It appears it hates cold weather. A dozen 
officers are billeted in the Guerins' house; two of 
their orderlies and the butler tried to crank it. The 
only signs of life were in the handle, which from time 
to time flew round with extraordinary rapidity. We 
called out to one not-over-cautious soldier, "Be careful; 
you will break your arm." 

He only answered: 

"If that happens I shall have two or three months 
of tranquillity." And that's how he felt anent the 
breaking of his arm! 

At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by 
the meadows of the silent crosses, skirting the hill of 
Leomont, with its great scars of 19 14 shell-holes, be- 
neath which is a little village with the strange name of 
Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it 
was once "Antelucus" (before the sacred grove), and 
afterward was a dependence of the priory of Leomont 
built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. 
Then we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road lead- 
ing to Crevic. Great stretches of Lorraine, V6l£gante 
et melancolique Lorraine, were flung out before us under 
rain-clouds and sunbursts — lovely stretches, with fields 

i39 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of 
red-stemmed osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root 
in which women and old men and little children were 
working, piling high red-white mounds or separating 
the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles. 

Crevic is shot to bits. Of the chateau of General 
Lyautey 1 but a few crumbling walls remain. Though 
the piles of stones and mortar are covered with the 
green of three summers' growth, still the cannon are 
booming to the east and north. The perfectly banal 
church is intact. People were walking about the streets 
and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes, and 
there seemed many very little children. We passed out 
over an old bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great 
curtain of rain hung to the west near Dombasle, the 
smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught and 
held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and 
there were other great stretches of unspeakable beauty, 
soft, rolling, and radiant — crying out about the genera- 
tions that have bent over them. 

The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely de- 
stroyed church of pure Gothic that workmen are at last 
roofing over; but three winters have already passed 
over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go 
out through the village in the direction of Dombasle, 
and suddenly against some gorgeous masses of clouds 
we see an avion de chasse, "type Nieuport," as E. M., 
who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial, tells 
me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch 
pinning two gray velvety curtains together, where a 
ray of blinding light falls. Then it makes a series of 
marvelous vrilles, and I say to her, "How can men who 
do that love finite woman?" A great observation 
balloon, saucisse, hung in the sky, and another broad 

1 Governor-General of Morocco. 
140 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

shaft of light lay on the far hills behind which lie in- 
trenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets. 

At this moment a panne. The only thing in sight is 
a long line of war-supply wagons drawn by tired horses, 
and women and old men and children bending over their 
eternal piles of beet-root. But E. M. said, "Sooner 
than change that tire, I'll bury the Ford by the road." 
So we bumped and crawled along till we met a line of 
camions. The first was driven by a handsome, tall, 
very small-handed, extremely polite Frenchman, who 
knew Fords, having been four months with Piatt Andrew 
at the Field Service Ambulance in the rue Raynouard, 
and who agreed to change it for us. 

A hail-storm, like a pelting of diamonds, as sudden 
bursts of light caught it, came up in the middle of the 
operation, which was finally completed with expressions 
of mutual satisfaction. The shining storm was with- 
drawn like a curtain, showing the sun on the great 
stretches, and Dombasle with the smoke of its hundred 
chimneys was a thing of inexpressible beauty, while be- 
hind it were the great towers of St. -Nicolas du Port, 
for which we decided to make a dash. We got into it, 
through Dombasle, as a perfect rainbow rose from the 
Meurthe and disappeared into the horizon, where the 
gray-clad men with the pointed helmets are in- 
trenched. 

"For luck," said E. M. 

But I asked, "Whose luck?" the rainbow evidently 
being neutral. 

We had some difficulty in finding anything but the 
towers of the church. There is no square in front; 
tiny streets encircle it on all sides. But we at last got 
into the narrow street in front of the cathedral, which 
is called "Des Trots Pucelles," in memory of the three 
young girls to whom St. -Nicolas gave a dot. I was not 

141 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

alone in remembering that he is the patron saint of 
those contemplating matrimony. 

The church is of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
and among the largest of the Gothic churches of Lorraine. 
Swelling-breasted pigeons with gorgeous pink and red 
and green and purple upon their throats were nestled 
against the beautiful carvings of the gray portals, and 
much soft cooing was going on. Above the central 
door, in the trumeau, is a statue of the saint said to 
have been done by the brother of Ligier Richier, and I 
thought of the lovely Gothic fireplace by Ligier Richier 
himself taken from St.-Mihiel, and now at Ochre Court 
in Newport. 

Noble interior, though the pillars have had the beau- 
tiful sharpness of their chiseling blunted by much paint- 
ing and whitewashing. There are remains of early 
frescoes on some of the croisillons, and near a door I 
found a tiny, ancient painting representing scenes in 
the life of St. -Nicolas, inclosed in glass in a modern 
varnished wooden frame. Somewhere in the pavement 
of the church is a certain potent slab, and she who steps 
upon it is married within the year. Its exact position 
is not known, but I told E. M. to take an exhaustive 
walk about and commend herself to heaven and the 
saint. 

When we came out into the ancient streets the western 
sky was aflame and there were translucent pale greens 
ahead of us, We turned again toward the open road and 
Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century. 
Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, 
followed by the great bishops and the builder-monks, 
who constructed the immense abbeys and the churches 
of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilder- 
ness had become what I saw it that afternoon. From 
the chimneys of its munition-factories, against the am- 

142 



EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 

ber sky, there poured and twisted a wonder of gray and 
white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darken- 
ing, soot-blackened streets were overflowing with hu- 
man energies spilling themselves into the greedy war- 
machine. There are vast monotonous workingmen's 
quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being 
trampled in the wine-press. . . . 

It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of 
the maire, Mr. Keller, the celebrated house where the 
Prince de Beauvau was born, where the beautiful 
Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, 
where the Treaty of Luneville was signed in 1801, and 
where, in 19 14, the maire lodged the generals of the 
German army. Madame was still at her hospital, so 
we left our cards and came back to the hotel. 

Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this 
pleasant room to motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, 
Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is the program. 
It's raining, it's hailing, it's blowing, but I bethink me 
of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, 
and those other saints, St.-Eucarius and St. -Loup, start- 
ing out in all kinds of weather, and of the ceuvre that we 
are to visit, founded last summer for children gathered 
in 191 7 from villages where there had been bad gas 
attacks. The history of Lorraine piles high about me — 
the cannon boom. What a day to lie with your life's 
blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields. . . . 
The motor horn sounds. 



CHAPTER III 

TOUL 

October ijth. 

WE lunched at the Cafe Stanislas yesterday after 
the wildest of drives into Nancy, the Ford 
seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We did 
ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I 
eat except to "stoke the engine." The proprietor, who 
left Alsace as a boy after 1870, stood and talked to us, 
as we ate our ceufs au beurre noir, as French people alone 
can talk. He said "they" came only with fire and 
sword; the great Napoleon, who came with the same, 
had also his "Code" in his pocket. Then he spoke of 
the marvelous administration of Germany, the order 
and the use made of each one's capacities, which was 
why they could tenir. 

"We only ask for a leader here in France, to be bien 
men$s. All other things we have in abundance. But 
if a department is to be organized or reconstructed, it 
seems always to be given into the hands of some one 
knowing nothing about it." 

In between I kept looking out where against gray 
skies beings half child, half angel hold up stone flames, 
and panaches leaning one against the other. The gild- 
ing of the grilles has a dull gleam through the wet. The 
statue of Stanislas le Bienfaisanl was black and big. 
Everybody was talking about the unexpected visit of 

144 



TOUL 

the German avion in the bad weather the night 
before. 

The station was further devastated, a train moving out 
was wrecked and many permissionnaires killed, a house 
near the H6tel Excelsior et d'Angleterre was totally 
demolished, the avion flying very low, not more than 
twenty-five meters above the town at one time. After 
lunch we went over to the prefect's house, from where 
we were to motor with him to Toul. He could not go 
with us, as he was out investigating the damage of the 
night before, but one of his daughters was waiting for 
us in the Prefecture motor. 

Le Grand Couronng was but a ridge of mist and clouds 
as we passed out of town, but it was there that the 
Germans were held up and Nancy was saved that first 
September of the war, there that was written the 
paraphe de Castelnau, and from there the German Em- 
peror had looked into France. 

I never should have known Lorraine if I had not seen 
it gray and wet under its autumn skies, bands of lemon 
and amber at sunset finishing the garb of its gray days. 
As we sped along I could just distinguish the landscape 
— villages lost in the immense stretch of the plains, and 
great forests of beech and oak in which are strange, 
mysterious ponds (etangs), and before my mind passed 
for an instant images of those solitaries of the twilight 
centuries, slipping through them with staff and scrip, 
after the Romans, and bringing to the land the things 
Rome tried to destroy. 

A beautifully kept straight road leads to Toul. From 
time to time one sees rusty barbed-wire entanglements 
and camouflaged trenches, for, on this road, had the 
Germans taken Nancy, they would have come to Toul, 
as they did in 1870. Outside the town are double ram- 
parts, where the guard stopped us, but the military 

i45 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

chauffeur cried the magic words, "Monsieur le Pre jet" 
and we passed in through the Porte de Metz, dating from 
the time of Vauban, then skirted the town, to get to the 
barracks of Luxembourg, where hundreds of little chil- 
dren, first gathered together by Madame Mirman, are 
now being taken care of by the American Red Cross. 
It is conducted by Doctor Sedgwick, unfortunately in 
Paris. It seemed a dreary spot that afternoon, and it 
has since been confided to me that the weather is always 
dreadful there. The barracks are after the new model 
of groups of one-storied houses, which, it appears, have 
also disadvantages, as well as the large buildings they 
superseded. 1 

It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made 
blind dashes from one to the other with the French 
directors. A consolation to find oneself in the dormi- 
tories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or 
howling!) in little cots or perambulators, out of the 
horrid cold. 

They are not always orphans, but their mothers work 
in the fields of Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. 
Doctor Peel, second in charge, came at last from a dis- 
tant building, and met us in the school-room, out of which 
a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. 
Tea was offered us, but we came away; time was short 
and I was a-hungered, after the cold, windy, wet deso- 
lation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight of the 
beautiful cathedral. 

Some one said, "Why 'sight-seeing'?" but I said, "It's 
soul-seeing." And there was some lifting of the being 
as we stepped into the loveliness of the pale-gray vault- 
ing of the church of St.-Etienne. At the end of the 

1 The American Red Cross Asylum at Luxembourg (Toul), now under 
the very able management of Dr. Maynard Ladd, has accommodations 
for nearly a thousand children, well and ill, and a maternity hospital. 

The American forces hold the line to the northwest of Tout. 

146 



TOUL 

apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and 
it reminded me of Huysmans's phrase about the cathe- 
dral of Chartres, li Une blonde aux yeux bleus." We 
stepped over worn pierres tombales, and as I stood on 
one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was 
fifteen hundred and something, I looked up and saw in 
the wall a new marble plaque, and it was to the memory 
of "Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la Legion 
d'Honneur, Croix de Guerre, ne 1888. . . . Mort glorieuse- 
ment pour la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916." And so one's 
thoughts are jerked from the past into the dreadful, 
sacramental present. 

Close by the cathedral is the Hotel de Ville, once 
the Episcopal Palace, a gem of the eighteenth century. 
We stepped from the little square in front of the church 
into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a flat, 
round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of 
a woman in contemplation, and one side of the garden 
is hedged in by the flying buttresses and gargoyles of 
the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to its gravel 
walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open 
long windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need 
to see it under warm, sunset skies, with the linden- trees 
of the garden in full blossom, to be possessed of its 
charm. 

An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral 
as we issued from the garden in a gust of wind which 
blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when I and it 
were righted he was gone. But it's all a part of 
history. 

We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old 
Gothic church in the rue Carnot. (Like every town in 
Lorraine and in the whole of France there is a rue Car- 
not, and it's horribly monotonous when your soul is 
aflame.) 

147 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

As we entered, a thick rich light came through the 
ancient windows. 

A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and 
pitying statue of St. -Anne — sixteenth or seventeenth 
century, I didn't know which — and a pale, tiny child 
with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I 
thought on the oceans of fear children have passed 
through in this war, and again I besought God to take 
care of His world. 

As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American 
soldiers kneeling before the high altar. That spot of 
khaki and its young, unmistakable silhouette under the 
gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed 
momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was 
the country of my birth and my love pursuing its gi- 
gantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded with un- 
countable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two 
anonymous soldiers became typical of each and every 
Miles Gloriosus since the world began, and as they knelt 
there on the altar steps I knew that they had been 
laid on that other dreadful altar of the world's sin. . . . 

An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic 
cloister of the sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and 
flower-planted court. It had a few fresh chippings on 
its belle patine, the results of a bomb which fell in it 
a few months ago. 

Long lines of soldiers' socks were hung on strings 
across one corner of it, and soldiers were sitting in a 
little room-like corridor, leading I know not where, 
reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then, out 
through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the 
streets, the loveliness of Toul imagined rather than 
really perceived, for the rain was falling again. Khaki- 
clad men of the Division marocaine, together with blue- 
clad companions, were threading their way through the 

148 



TOUL 

narrow streets, and there were few women and children. 
I thought how I had seen the two towers of the church 
shining from afar as I passed by in the train that June 
evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never 
know. . . . Did the one from Nantes return to hold his 
first-born in his arms? Or the fiance return to consum- 
mate his nuptials? 

Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing 
at the door of a little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was 
the nearest resemblance to anything familiar in Toul, 
and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled 
broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what 
they termed the "blessed lingo," and called it "some 
luck." 

"I was just thinking, 'me for the coop,'" genially 
continued the biggest, raw-boned, lantern-jawed one who 
had a bad bronchial cold and wore a muffler about his 
throat. He turned out to be from Omaha; the smaller 
one was from Hackensack, N. J. (with an emphasis on the 
N. J.). We talked about simple and unglorious mat- 
ters, what they had for breakfast, among other things, 
and it was, in parenthesis, what any Frenchman would 
call a dinner — ham and eggs and oatmeal and white 
bread (which none save American soldiers get in 
France these days) and jam and coffee. They were 
from Pagny-sur-Meuse near by — pronounced "Pag-ni" 
by the Omaha man. The Hackensack man avoided it. 
He quite simply wanted "the war to begin," so that 
he might "show the Germans how." 

"We're sure to lick 'em in the spring," the one with 
the cold said, "but it's a long time waiting for the fun 
to begin, and I haven't been warm since I got here." 

I asked them how they came into France. 

"All I know is that after we got off the boat we were 
three days in some sort of a milk-train; there wasn't 
11 149 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

room to sit, let alone lie. We drew lots and I got the 
baggage-rack; but what saved us was that we could 
get out at every station, and, believe me, the fellows 
that got drunk were the only ones that pulled in all 
right — the others were sent up to hospital soon as they 
arrived." 

In the best and most persuasive of Y. M. C. A. man- 
ners I said to this special Miles Gloriosus: 

"It isn't a remedy, however, that you could really 
count on." 

"But I say," answered the Omaha man, "you'll own 
up that it's worth trying." 

It was getting late and, the Omaha man having the 
best of it, we parted with smiles of mutual appreciation. 
It's all so simple — and so momentous. 

Then back to Nancy, running swiftly over a white 
road, the gray sky very low, and on either side green 
and yellow and brown fields, and the oak and beech 
forest of Haye. The Grand Couronne for a moment was 
divested of its mists, and some brightening of the west- 
ern sky touched its ridge with a subdued splendor; and 
then we got into Nancy and were deposited at the Pre- 
fecture, where we made our adieux. We proceeded to 
the garage of a stoutish, blond man of pronounced Teu- 
ton type and accent, with an uncertain smile — and a 
coreless heart, I think — who cranked la Ford (by the 
way, Fords change their sex in France), and we started 
out through the town that night was enveloping, with 
but one dull eye to light us to Luneville. We thought 
the trip might prove fairly uncertain, but didn't know 
how much so till there was an impact, in the crowded 
suburb, and a horse's form with legs in air, looking 
as big as a monster of the Pliocene age, showed for an 
instant on our radiator, then fell to the ground. A 
crowd immediately gathered, while the driver of the 

150 



TOUL 

cart proceeded to tell us what he thought of us in partic- 
ular and women drivers in general. But, though unfor- 
tunate, we felt blameless, as the horse had been tied 
behind the wagon standing at the curb and there was 
no light, except something very dim coming from a green- 
grocer's. We departed to the commissaire de police with 
the man and a couple of gendarmes, explained that we 
were willing to do anything and everything if he would 
only let us proceed to Luneville, gave the magic name 
"Commission Calif ornienne," and equally potent refer- 
ence to the Prefet de la Meurthe et Moselle whose house 
we had just left. Then with beating hearts and a 
chastened outlook on life — I use the word "outlook" 
rather wildly; we couldn't see anything — we passed out 
through the great manufacturing district. Every now 
and then our feeble ray was swallowed up by the great 
lamps of a military auto or the large round headlight 
of a camion. As we passed through St. -Nicolas du Port 
and Dombasle the blue of the soldiers' tunics took on 
a strange ghoul-like color, a white incandescent sort of 
gray, and the moving forms seemed twice their natural 
size. We couldn't see the streets at all, and the only 
thing we wanted to do in all the world was to get to 
Luneville and run la Ford into the garage of M. Guerin. 
When that was accomplished we decided to say good- 
by to the proud world, sent regrets to Mile. Guerin, and 
had a much more modest repast served in my room by 
the deft maid, whose husband got typhoid fever in the 
trenches and died at Epinal last year. Later the mis- 
tress of the house came up to know if we were com- 
fortable, and told us her husband, too, had died of it in 
hospital at Toul. And then I read Les Vieux Chdteaux 
de la Vesouze, a modern Etude lorraine, and Promenades 
autour de Luneville, printed in 1838, to the accompani- 
ment of rattling windows and the heavy boom of dis- 

151 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

tant cannon. All else was quiet. Near my room is a 
device plastered on the wall, Qui tient a sa tranquillite sait 
respecter celle des autres. Isn't it nice? It makes one 
steal in at night, get into slippers immediately, and ring 
gently in the morning. 

It is still raining, hailing, blowing — dreadfully dis- 
couraging weather to investigate the amours of the 
eighteenth century, and I have a couple of twentieth- 
century idyls right under my eyes, too. I had planned 
a stroll in the park to trace the steps of Leopold and 
Stanislas to the doors of the fairest of ladies, and Pan- 
pan and St. -Lambert and the Chevalier de Boufflers, 
and all the other charmeurs. I'll either have to leave 
them out of the Journal or do them in some half -dream 
when I'm back in Paris and warm! What they did in 
this sort of weather I don't know, except that when they 
knocked at a door or tapped at a window they were sure 
of tender welcomes, they and the easy verses that ac- 
companied them. 



CHAPTER IV 

A STROLL IN NANCY 

October 15th. 

I SPENT yesterday a-wandering in the old streets of 
Nancy, between gusts of wind and rain and great 
bursts of sun. After much coaxing, la Ford was cajoled 
into taking the road at 9.30, but as we got to Nancy and 
into the Place Stanislas suddenly her front wheels 
spread apart. E. M. gave one glance, but not at all 
the glance of despair she would have given had it 
happened on the road, and then flew to seek her waiting 
bridegroom at the H6tel Excelsior et d'Angleterre, while 
I, less enthusiastically, sought the blond chauffeur of 
the cordless heart. He seemed quite human, as, un- 
screwing the bar in front, which crumbled softly like a 
piece of bread, he held up a piece and said, "C'ttait fait 
pour vous casser le con." 

Seeing the American flag flying from the ground-floor 
window of one of the beautiful old buildings of the Place 
Stanislas, I went in to find Mrs. Dawson installed in 
charge of the Nancy branch of the "American Fund for 
French Wounded." It was another novelty for Stanislas 
to look upon out of his right eye ! He's been kept busy, 
these past three years, looking about him. The large 
room was filled with furniture M. Mirman is collecting 
for refugees — wardrobes, tables, chairs, in and on which 
were piles of shirts, vests, sweaters, cachenez, handker- 

iS3 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

chiefs, all from over the ocean. And really, when one 
investigates the comfort-bags filled by too-generous 
American hands, one has a cupidous feeling. There is 
a lavishness in the matter of Colgate's tooth-paste, for 
instance, which one can rarely get for love, and not 
at all for money, in Paris! 

I came away in a gray, slanting rain that made the 
Place Stanislas look as if Raffaello had done it over and 
framed it beautifully in gray. Great scratchings of 
rainfall, and soldiers and women hurrying through it. 
But le geste is not like the days when Raffaello painted 
— there are no skirts to lift up, or, rather, none that 
need lifting. 

Then I crossed over to the Place de la Carriere, 
where souvent en ces aimables lieux des heros et des devni- 
dieux had held their tournaments, and then into the 
church of St.-Epvre to get a Mass. The stained-glass 
windows, modern and very expensive-looking, were 
crisscrossed with broad stripes of paper on the side 
toward the railway, where the shocks from the fre- 
quent bombing of the station are especially felt. Every- 
where in Nancy the windows are broken, or criss- 
crossed with paper, or both. The church was blue with 
military. 

Afterward I walked through the Grande Rue. The 
ducal palace of the early sixteenth century, begun by 
Rene II, has its door scaffolded and sandbagged. It is 
the celebrated Musee Lorrain, whose treasures are now 
removed further from the frontier. It is here that the 
body of Charles III lay in such magnificence that there 
arose the saying in the sixteenth century that the three 
most gorgeous ceremonies in the world were the con- 
secration of a king of France at Reims, the crowning of 
an emperor of Germany at Frankfort, and the obsequies 
of a duke of Lorraine at Nancy. 

i54 



A STROLL IN NANCY 

I continued down the Grande Rue between groups of 
poilus, officers, and the usual Sunday population coming 
from Mass, or getting in last dinner provisions, to the 
Porte de Graffe of the fourteenth century, beyond which 
is the Porte de la Citadelle, and then the garrison. As 
one walks along, the snatches of talk one overhears are 
" Bombards deux fois," "Pas un vitre qui reste" "Volant 
tres-bas," etc. 

I came back through the park. In it is a modern 
iron bandstand, fortunately copied after the delicious 
designs of Jean Lamour — only he would have done some- 
thing to relieve the heavy iron roof. And he quite 
certainly caught his inspiration musing about the park 
one autumn day, for everywhere I saw charming repeti- 
tions of his grilles in that delicate tracery of yellow leaf 
against gray trunk and branch. 

Old houses give on the park, where one might dream 
dreams, and find the world — perhaps well lost. Many 
windows broken, and more crisscrossing with bands of 
paper. 

It was getting to be 12.30 when, having been as much 
of an angel as the three dimensions permit, I emerged 
on to the Place Stanislas to see E. M. approaching 
with a young blue-clad aviator, with something dis- 
tinguished yet modest in his bearing, of whom I in- 
stantly thought he is one of those qui cherche sa recom- 
pense plutbt dans les yeux de ses hommes que dans les 
notes de ses chefs — and so it proved to be. He didn't 
even wear the brisquets of his years of service on his 
arm. 

"Tout le monde sait que je n'ai pas Me trois ans sans 
rien faire, ,} he said, later, during lunch, which we took 
in the Cafe Stanislas, crowded with gallooned and deco- 
rated officers. Several red-and-white marked autos of 
the General Staff were waiting before the door, where 

*$$ 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Stanislas also could see them, and those beings, half 
human, half divine, of the sky-line, framed it all. After- 
ward I again removed my three dimensions, hunting for 
M. Pierre Boye, the great authority on all things of 
Lorraine, M. Guerin having given me a letter to him. 
On arriving at the house, through quiet gray streets, 
there was no answer to my numerous ringings of the 
bell, so I came back, drawn irresistibly to the Place 
Stanislas. By this time it was aglow in the afternoon 
light; great masses of clouds even at 3.30 were tinted 
with yellow and orange, and every inch of gilding caught 
the light. I hailed an antique cab and drove out where 
I could look over rolling stretches of country, along the 
road to Toul. The brown and yellow fields were aglow, 
the bronzing forests, too ; above were piled the high and 
splendid clouds of autumnal Lorraine, and I saw where 
Claude le Lorrain had got his masses. The cocher then 
proceeded to bring me back to town by a perfectly hid- 
eous road, called Quai Claude le Lorrain — on one side 
the blackened railway, on the other modern claptrappy 
houses with their windows shattered and their roofs 
damaged. 

I then told him to take me to the church of the Cor- 
deliers, where I stepped suddenly, not only into its late 
afternoon dimness, but into the dimness of past ages. 
A shaft of light from a high window showed me a dull, 
rich bit of color on an ancient pillar, in a sort of chapel ; 
and then my eye fell on what I had come to see, the 
tomb of the Duchesse Philippe de Gueldre, widow of 
Rene II, bearing the incomparable stamp of the genius 
of Ligier Richier. 

I tiptoed toward the stone slab where that great lady 
of another age is lying asleep, clad in the dark robe of 
the Poor Clares. Her hands, folded downward, are 
clasped at her waist. Under the cowl the pale head is 

156 



A STROLL IN NANCY 

turned gently, as if in sleep. 1 She is an enduring image 
of resignation, not alone for herself, but for all of us 
who live and die, we don't quite know how or why, and 
who must "endure our going hence even as our coming 
hither." 

The church was constructed by her husband, Rene" 
II, Duke of Lorraine, to commemorate the deliverance 
of Nancy and the defeat of Charles the Bold, Duke of 
Burgundy, in 1477. Duke Rene himself had a glorious 
reign ; for him the arts and letters were the ornament of 
victory. I discovered a commemorative monument of 
my friend Duke Leopold, flanked rather flamboyantly 
by unquiet, yet charming, statues of Faith and Hope! 
Also an elaborate statue of Katerina Opalinska, the 
consort of Stanislas, who, though he had been somewhat 
forgetful of her in life, had done really all that a wife 
could wish in the matter of the tomb. But some virtue 
more mystic than the decorative Faith and Hope of the 
eighteenth century exhaled from the quiet figure of 
Philippe de Gueldre. 

Near the high altar is the Chapelle Ronde begun 
by Charles III, the grandson of Rene, in 1607, intended 
as a sepulcher for the princes of Lorraine, and in a 
beautiful grille are entwined the arms of Lorraine and 
Austria. Then the sacristan came in to light the candles 
of the high altar, the church got suddenly quite dark, 

1 Her epitaph, written by herself, is to the effect that underneath lies a 
rotting worm, giving to death the tribute of nature, the earth her only 
covering, and begging her sisters, the Poor Clares, to say for her a Re- 
quiescat in pace. 

Ci-gist un ver tout en pourriture, 

Donnant d. mort le tribut de la nature. 

Sceur Philippe de Gueldre fust Royne du passS, 

Terre soulat pour toute couverture. 

Sceurs, dites-lui une requiescat in pace. 

MDXLVII. 

157 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

from the organ came the strains of "O quam suavis est, 
Domine," and people began to come in to Benediction. 
The blue and vermilion and gold of the mausoleum of 
Rene II faded and one saw only vague outlines of saints 
and angels, and a figure of the Eternal Father. It cried 
out of that other deliverance of Nancy; but when the 
world war is over will his widow, Philippe de Gueldre, 
conjunx Piissimi, still be sleeping quietly, her brown cowl 
over her head and her crown at her feet? Her soul 
"conducted to Paradise by angels, where martyrs re- 
ceived her and led her into the Holy City Jerusalem." 
The church got quite full, the organist continued to 
play early Italian music, and the "Pieta, Signor" of 
Pergolese rose as I knelt by Philippe de Gueldre. The 
great cope of the priest shone, the smell of incense per- 
vaded the dim spaces, the "Tanturn Ergo" sounded, 
and I bowed my head. . . . 

Then out into a world of fading light, found the 
cocker in the exact attitude I had left him, and begged 
him to drive quickly (which was impossible) to the 
Hotel Excelsior et d'Angleterre, bethinking me of the 
5.30 train to Luneville. As we went through the dim, 
charming streets I remembered an old verse I had 
found in one of M. Guerin's books, by an unreservedly 
admiring individual, who said that if he had one foot 
in Paradise and the other in Nancy, he would withdraw 
the one in Paradise, that both might be in Nancy! 

I found waiting at the door of the hotel E. M., the 
distingue young aviator, and Don Kelley, en permission 
for twenty-four hours from Gondrecourt, strong and 
eager, since a week at Gondrecourt, since a month in 
France for the first time in his life. 

The young men took us to the station and deposited 
us in the train and made their adieux. For very special 
reasons at that moment I said to E. M. : 

158 



A STROLL IN NANCY 

"If you are going back to Luneville on my account, 
don't!" 

The guard had closed the door of the compartment, 
had sounded his whistle, but I caught the look in her 
eye and out we jumped, returning to the hotel, where we 
gave what we hoped was a pleasant surprise party. 
Diner a quatre at seven o'clock. About a dozen Ameri- 
cans en permission were dining among many French- 
men, and we amused ourselves investigating the multi- 
colored intricacies of the various uniforms, aviators, 
cavalry, infantry, artillery, and the many "grades." 
Then again a dash for the station — Count de L. had to 
get to Paris, and Don Kelley to Gondrecourt. The 
latter said, as we stood in the dark, battered station: 

*T am where I would most want to be in the world, 
and, though I am an only son, I am where my parents 
would most wish me to be. When I get back to Gondre- 
court and get into that long, dark shed and see the men 
rolled up, and if it is raining, the water dripping in, I 
shall know it is the real thing, and those of my genera- 
tion who have known it and those who have not will 
be forever divided." 

Permissions not being among things safely trifled with, 
we then saw them into their train, which was leaving 
first, and crossed the rails to where ours, dark, filled 
with returning officers, was waiting; and so out into 
the night with all curtains carefully drawn, the stars 
shining. It was a nuit a boches, one of the officers said, 
continuing, "It's often an obsession with them — for a 
long time they won't come near Nancy or Luneville, 
and then every night when it is at all clear they appear." 
The inhabitants can choose (in their minds) between 
good weather and avions or bad weather and safety. 

Trains from Nancy to Luneville seem to have a way 
of hunting up stations, threading them up, and what 

i59 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

one does easily in three-quarters of an hour in a motor 
takes an hour and a half to three, according to the 
stops. At Blainville we descended to show our sauf- 
conduits, the guard standing just behind a convenient 
puddle that every one splashed into and then stepped 
out of. Finally, Luneville, night-enveloped, lighted 
only with flashes from electric pocket-lamps, like great 
fireflies. And coming through the night from Nancy, 
I kept thinking how France had done enough, more than 
enough, the impossible, and what a cold and dreadful 
grind the war had become, and of untried young Ameri- 
cans sleeping in dim villages so near. And many other 
things that it is bootless to record. Nous sommes dedans. 



CHAPTER V 

VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN 

OUT of Luneville over the muddy Vesouze, through 
the Place Brulee, and onto a pasty road, E. M. 
driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded love. As 
we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then 
turned his back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, 
for all the world like the tales of the famous dwarf 
Bebe, during years the delight of the Court of Stanislas. 

Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest 
yellow or red, as the sun fell on them through rifts in 
dark clouds, and many women, old men, and children 
were working in wet beet-root fields, among little group- 
ings of black crosses. . . . 

We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. 
Such a change! Before reaching it, instead of the skele- 
ton outline of homes one now sees orderly rows of red 
roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary, 
pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. 
(Miss Polk), had got suddenly to a point where it be- 
gan to show, though the finished houses will be too damp 
for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other things, 
must await the spring. 

Everywhere in the streets the busy work of recon- 
struction is proceeding. Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont 
are coming and going, helping with masonry, bringing 
in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always lived 

161 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

there; not en passant par la Lorraine. It's a very hu- 
man document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as 
far as they are concerned, when they leave a village 
they only change their residence. For the women the 
thing is much more serious. They get a change of regi- 
ment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail 
of the war. Things in Vitrimont were simply taking 
their inevitable course. Nothing is held back for long, 
with the generations pressing thick and fast. Black- 
aproned children with books on their backs, to whom 
E. M. gave little slabs of chocolate, were coming 
from the new school-house. Old men were hobbling 
about, and women bending over embroidery frames, 
in houses often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. 
In the old days Lorraine furnished beautiful damasks 
and gold galloons and laces to Paris and Versailles. 

We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman 
was just taking from its frame a beautiful beaded bag 
such as one would buy very, very dear in the Rue de la 
Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the 
light falling on her pale, withered face, wearing a great 
black-bowed head-dress, a yellow cat in her lap. It was 
an interieur that would have done honor to any great 
museum. 

We visited Mile. Antoine, living in a reconstructed 
street named after a Polish prince. She escaped to 
Luneville with her servant on the day of the entry of 
the Germans into the village, August 23, 19 14, fleeing 
through the ancient forest, but returned to her Lares 
and Penates a few days afterward with German passes. 
She represents culture in the village, and is clear-eyed, 
sweet-voiced, but with two red spots on her cheeks — 
she is fighting off consumption by living out of doors 
with her chickens and live stock, in sabots and apron 
and shawl. A beautiful old desk was in her living-room, 

162 




MISS polk's wedding 

The Comtesse de Buyer (Miss Polk) on the arm of Monsieur Mirman, Prefect of the 
Meurthe et Moselle, after her wedding at \ ltnmont, September, ioi7- 



VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN 

and there was a discussion as to whether it was Louis 
XVI or Directoire, but under any name one would have 
loved to possess it. The windows looked out onto the 
inevitable dung-heap, but beyond were bronzing forests, 
and, in between, fields the color of semi-precious stones. 

Hearing the sound of music as we passed the church, 
we went in and found some young girls were practising 
a "Credo," clustered about the little organ, and wearing 
brooches with a device of thistle and double Lorraine 
cross that Madame de Buyer had given them on her 
wedding-day. I looked again upon the lovely old fif- 
teenth-century vaulting, fully restored, shifting my eye 
hurriedly from the hideous but seemingly imperishable 
dado with its design of painted folds of cloth. At the 
door the little holy water fonts, formed of shells held 
upon two heads of seraphim, gave me a thrill of joy — 
and sadness, too, that beauty is so perishable. 

Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways 
were muddy beneath the leafless trees. Bead crosses 
and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums deco- 
rated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the 
dead. I stood by a breach in the wall near the grave 
of "Charles Carron, musicien, souvenir d'un camarade, 
j I aoilt, IQ14," looking out toward the forest of Vitri- 
mont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; 
more jasper and amethyst and chrysoprase and cornelian 
fields rolled gently in between it and me. There was 
the band of yellow like a Greek border to a garment in 
the western sky — only that and nothing more, yet some 
beauty and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and 
woodcock, gray pheasant and larks, were flying about, 
and some strongly marked black-and-white magpies were 
pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked 
myself again, "What is it that stamps Lorraine with 
such beauty?" General de Buyer told me that when 

163 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, "C'est trop vert," 
and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian 
Isles, it would seem too green. But I saw, returning 
there in autumn, that the soul of Lorraine, V elegante et 
douleureuse, is like unto tarnished silver, with its grays, 
yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has suffered, 
hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places 
have been devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. 
And I knew that one must see it in autumn, beneath the 
wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with their hints of 
color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and 
rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious 
earth — and, in between, the beat of the human heart. 
It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving 
light of ages. Those secular beeches, that I had first 
seen in their tenderest green, had become a brilliant 
yellow, and were turned to the south. The great bronze 
oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as 
those of the human beings passing beneath them. In 
all these forests round about Vitrimont, Parroy, and 
Mondon the legendary lords of the country hunted ; the 
roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman high- 
ways which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Treves, 
from Toul to Metz, and again from Langres to Stras- 
burg. The name Luneville emerges out of the night 
of the tenth century in the person of Etienne, Bishop 
of Toul, successor of St. -Gerard, and Folmar I, Count 
of Luneville, was married to Sparhilde, descended from 
Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost any 
one who respects himself in these parts talks quite 
casually of being descended from Charlemagne, or 
Charles the Bald, or Ren6 the Victorious, as a Boston 
man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar's hunting- 
lodge was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes 
to get from Luneville to Vitrimont. In time it was 

164 



VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN 

transformed into a chateau, and around it grew a vil- 
lage, which in turn became a fortified town, then the 
capital of Leopold and Stanislas. 

I stood for a long time by that 19 14 breach in the 
wall, and the grave of Charles Carron, musicien, looking 
out over the rolling fields in the late October afternoon, 
migrating birds passing against the amber sky, red 
vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and 
beeches; near me was a tangle of wild -plum bushes, 
stiffened blackberry-vines, and dried ramie. All except 
the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was in 
sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, 
russet, jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow 
rivers, slipping between bushes of osier and plum, and 
somewhere there is a slower, nigrescent canal scarcely 
a-move between willows and poplars. And those men 
who are out there where that dull thunder is! . . . 

I thought how often in her history the men that 
hunted in her forests or tilled her fields had reddened 
them with their blood, or, buried in them, had increased 
the harvests, fighting now against one invader, now 
another, being continually thrown back from power to 
power like a ball, with nothing changeless save the 
changelessness of their changing destiny — and its 
unescapableness. 

And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine 
prince, the Crusades began, and under a duke of Lor- 
raine, Charles V, they ended. And of the holy glory 
of Jeanne d'Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, 
of the covenant of our own men. 

I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely 
of the natural world. 

As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of 
that band of lemon. The western sky became a vast 
ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat in it. The 
12 165 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

red roofs of Luneville were transfigured, a crimson glow 
was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, 
outlined against a blue-white eastern sky. But only 
for a few minutes. The streets of Luneville were al- 
ready dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs. 

We stopped for tea at the house of Madame on 

the outskirts of the town. It had been occupied by the 
Germans that first August, and in one of the salons 
was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not re- 
plastered or papered. "They" had rolled up her rugs 
and given them to her, and she and her four young 
daughters had lived in the upper stories during the oc- 
cupation, and seen war very close from their windows. 
The only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I 
think, was missing. In the cellars and in the garden, 
whose walls are still breached and broken, dead and 
wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had 
lain. 

The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young 
aviators were there for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely 
linked, threaded the black streets to the Hotel des Vosges. 
And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn. 



CHAPTER VI 

AT THE GUERINS' 

October 16th. 

IN the park of the chateau, sitting on an old stone 
bench under yellowing chestnut-trees. 

Soldiers are coming and going. The chateau has been 
for many years a barracks. One guardian of the park, 
of the now so-despised race of gendarmes, has walked 
by three times, for I have my little note-book in my lap 
and my pencil in my hand and I am plainly not of 
Luneville. He is just passing me again, and I say 

"C'est beau, le pare." 

He answers, "Perhaps in summer," evidently not 
stirred by autumnal Lorraine, and then, "Madame est 
en visitef* 

I answer, "Yes, with Miss Crocker." 

That name being magic in these parts, he salutes and 
passes on. 

Of the lovely old bosquets where Stanislas combined 
his jets d'eau, his grottes, his Chinese pavilions, and his 
parterres, the long avenue and the great flat basin of the 
fountain, in which black swans are floating, are all that 
remain. From the end of this avenue can be seen 
the aviation field with its great hangars. The low ter- 
races have borders of autumn flowers, dahlias, chrys- 
anthemums, red vines, dead leaves, and moss-grown 
and charming statues of ancient love-making gods, 

167 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

who came into their own again in those amorous days. 
There is a statue to M. Guerin's poet son born and dead 
between two invasions, but a lovely eighteenth-century 
statue of a veiled woman renders mou and without ac- 
cent the flat, white-marble shaft that commemorates 
his earthly span (i 8 74-1 908). The statue of Erckmann 
is also in the nineteenth-century manner. Is the human 
race as uncharming as modern sculptors would make 
it? One feels apologetic toward the ages to come, and 
one wants to cry out that we weren't so bad, after 
all, and that seemingly soulless individual in a frock- 
coat and baggy trousers and top-hat, looking so unat- 
tractive in white marble, was really a delightful person, 
an imaginative lover, a perceptive intellectual, and 
witty to boot. He would have been the first to pro- 
test against his memorial ; and how he would have hated 
the geraniums and begonias planted at his base, and the 
wire fencing! 

Beyond the park, where the trees have been cleared 
away, is the brown, reedy Vesouze, a little border of old 
houses on its banks. Beyond is the rolling stretch of 
forest-covered hills and russet and jasper and topaz 
fields, and above it all the sunless and gray, but strange- 
ly luminous, noonday heaven of autumnal Lorraine. 

Later. 

Wandered about the town. Everywhere charming 
bits of autrefois arrest the eye. Over one doorway, be- 
tween two angels' heads of pure Louis XV, was written, 
"Fais bien, laisses dire" A little farther along, under 
a figureless niche, "Si le cceur fen dit un ave pour son 
dme." In the window of a pharmacy near by, occupy- 
ing a good old house with flat, gray facade, is a big 
Luneville porcelain jar bearing the words "Theriaca 
celestis," interwoven among flowered scrolls, and I 

168 



AT THE GUERINS' 

thought of eighteenth-century servants going in for 
herbs and various cures for masters and mistresses 
having "vapors." 

The portal of the church reminds me, with its rich, 
wine-colored tones, of the tezontle of the Mexican houses 
of the viceregal period. The words over the door are 
"Au Dieu de Paix," the God that this torn borderland 
seldom receives, and still rarely keeps, and above is a 
figure of Chronos, or the Almighty, I don't know 
which. 

A large black marble slab without name or date is 
near the door as one passes in; underneath lie the re- 
mains of Voltaire's divine Emilie. 1 Having loved much, 
let us hope much was forgiven her. The choir, pulpit, 
and confessionals are very pure Louis XV. Over the 
organ-loft are the words "Laudate Deum in chordis et 
organo," painted in among Pompadour knots which have 
been democratically colored red, white, and blue, near 
blue and gold fleurs-de-lys of another epoch. 

Against the wall of the facade is a marble urn that 
once contained the heart of Stanislas, who was very 
devout, and left no stone unturned, though he con- 
tinued to love not alone the arts, to placate the final 
judge. He was very fond of music while dining, but 
on Friday never permitted any except that of the harp, 
considered less earthly than violin and clavecin. He 
never missed Mass; he was merciful to the poor and 

1 Madame du Chatelet, around whose death-bed three men met in fra- 
ternal tolerance, Voltaire, St.-Lambert, and her husband, was buried here 
September n, 1749. In 1793 the tomb was profaned, the lead coffin 
stolen, the bones scattered. In 1858 they were gathered up and put in a 
modern coffin in which they now repose. She said of herself: " J'ai recu 
de Dieu une de ces times tendres et immuables qui ne savent ni deguiser ni mo- 
derer leurs passions; qui ne connaissent ni V affaiblissement ni le degoUt, et dont 
la tenacite sait resister d, tout, mime a la certitude de n'etre pas aimee. . . . 
Mais un cozur aussi tendre, peut-il lire rempli par un sentiment aussi paisible 
et aussi faible que VamitieV 

169 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

appreciative of the things of the mind. Not a bad show- 
ing; one hopes he's happy somewhere. 

In one of the side altars is a Pieta and three long lists 
of those just dead for France, whose 

graves are all too young as yet 
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned 
Its charge to each; 

and then, as I sat quietly thinking upon the passing of 
heroes, Shelley's immortal words kept sounding in my 
ears: 

And if the seal is set, 
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 
Break it not thou! . . . 

From the world's bitter wind 
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. 
What Adonais is, why fear we to become? 

Lunched at the Guerins'. La Ford being the only 
means of locomotion in Luneville, not even an old horse 
remaining to pull a cab, we had to give up the trip to 
Baccarat, and indeed any trip anywhere. Delighted to 
be able to fldner in the old streets without my umbrella 
being turned wrong side out. 

Overhead the avions were thick; we counted twelve 
at one time, some of them flying so low that we could 
hear words. Observation airplanes, bombarding air- 
planes, the swift avions de chasse, going in the direction 
of the forest of Parroy, where the Germans are intrenched 
since the retreat from Luneville, September, 19 14. 
Parroy and all that part of the country was completely 
laid waste in 1636 by Richelieu, who sent the cheerful 
report to Louis XIV that "Lorraine was reduced to 
nothing, and the inhabitants dead for the most part." 

That conquest of the unsubstantial air seems the 
greatest of all man's achievements. And as I walked 

170 



AT THE GUERINS' 

along there was an almost perceptible flinging of my 
soul into the heavenly spaces and I thought not on 
battles and wrecks nor even of hungry children, but 
rather of the discoverers of nature's secrets, the disciples 
of philosophers, the undiscourageable lovers of the arts, 
who everywhere are in the minority, and everywhere 
reach the heights, and everywhere in the end control 
the hosts, even of battle. And at the sudden dropping 
of the sun over the lovely Lorraine fields, become blue 
with scarcely a hint of the green and brown and ame- 
thyst of a moment ago, the band of yellow fringing the 
horizon — though with me walked the ghosts of men who 
at the word of command invaded or defended — I was 
not sad. A lean, brown, unexpectant urchin entered 
the town with me. I gave him a two-franc piece and 
a blessing, Pax tibi, which last, from the look in his 
eyes, some part of him understood. Then I turned 
into the beautiful old house of the mayor where gotlter 
and bridge had been arranged for us. I rapped with 
a large and very bright wrought-iron knocker bearing the 
date 1 78 1, and, entering, found myself in a great hall- 
way; to the left is the escalier d'honneur, with its beau- 
tiful wrought-iron balustrade. I mounted it, and 
passed through many rooms of noble yet thoroughly 
livable dimensions. They were filled with officers, 
some women came from their hospital service in nursing 
garb, groups of bright-eyed "filles d marier," and a few 
young aviators. The large salon has beautiful panel- 
ings, with heavy gilt motifs of tambour, torch, helmet 
and shield in the corners. In it was signed the cele- 
brated Traite de Luneville, 1801, and it is all very 
seigneurial. 

I found myself seated at a table with the mayor, 
General and Mme. de C, in nursing garb. I in- 
vestigated, during a couple of hours, the surprises of 

171 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

the erratic yet brilliant bridge of the moire de 
Luneville, whose delight was to mystify his partner 
as well as the adversary, and who, without in the least 
deserving it, won every rubber. I had a few bad "dis- 
tractions," but who would not. under that roof so rich 
in memories? 

During the occupation in 1014 the German generals 
and high officers entering the town were lodged on the 
second floor of the old house. The same thing had 
happened in 1870. 

We came away in pitch darkness at 7.30, but I 
can now skip and bound about the dark streets, with 
the best of them, no more feeling around for curbs, 
which seem again to be placed where they are to be 
expected. 

Afterward, dinner at M. Guerin's. General and Mme. 

de Buyer, General , M. Guerin's two sons, one a 

mitrailleuse officer for the moment near by at Blain- 
ville la Grande, the other the student and lover of the 
arts of whom I spoke, and whose every instinct is remote 
from killing. I sometimes wonder at the stillness of 
men like that — except that there is nothing to be done 
about it. General de Buyer told us of lance ■s-flamme, of 
flamme-snappes, of the obus asphyxiants, which burst 
without odor or smoke, but are deadly, all the same. 
Then the conversation turned on le conflit historique 
entre la race germanique et la nation gauloise which had 
begun before the Roman conquest. M. Guerin told us 
of places where still may be seen colossal walls and 
thick, crumbling towers, mysterious witness of those 
legendary conflicts, just as the Place des Cannes, or 
Place Brulee, is witness of those of 191 7. 

The younger Guerin son was preparing to go into 
diplomacy when the war broke out. I said, "Perhaps 
we will sometime be en poste together," and a strange 

172 



AT THE GUfiRINS' 

look that the pleasant dinner scene did not allow me 
to interpret immediately came over his face. 

"Peut-etre," he answered, slowly. 

I knew a moment afterward that that young man 
who loves his life was thinking, "if I am alive." He 
has seen so many fall. And suddenly came into my 
mind the lines of his poet brother, born and dead be- 
tween two invasions: 

Nous sommes, d mon Dieu, plusieurs dans la cilS, 
A porter haut le lys de la mysticite, . . . 

And for an infinitesimal moment, in spite of the pleas- 
ant evening meal, my thoughts, too, turned to invisibili- 
ties — his and my last end, and our veiled destinies. 



CHAPTER VII 

ACROSS LORRAINE 

Luneville, Tuesday, October 16th. 

ONE last look at the church, whose warm and lovely 
towers with their motifs of urn and scroll and 
angel were shining pinkly in the morning light. Then 
through the door of the Hotel de Ville, built on the site 
of the ancient abbey of St.-Remy, founded in the last 
years of the tenth century by Folmar de Luneville for 
the repose of his soul and of his wife's, and completely 
done over in the eighteenth century. As I turned in at 
the passageway leading through to the other street, old 
houses on one side, and on the other plantings of holly 
against the church walls, I thought of the saying of the 
Middle Ages, "II fait bon vivre sous la crosse" ("It is 
good to live under the bishops"), and how the peasants 
would come in from their hamlets, through the fields 
and forests, with their tithes. The monks generally 
springing from the people showed themselves more 
understanding of their wants and their miseries, and 
were less apt to overtax them, having fewer needs, than 
the lords with their wars, their ambitions, and their 
grandeurs. 

Then one finds oneself in the garden of the H6tel 
de Ville, where one doesn't think of the Middle Ages, 
for in it is a figure of a weeping woman, and on the 
statue's base are inscribed the names of young men 

174 



ACROSS LORRAINE 

fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without 
reason. 

At the station. Uabri de bombar dement pour permis- 
sionnaires is in an old convent having a deep cellar, across 
the railway. We carry our own luggage, resembling 
almost any poilu, and with grateful hearts think of 
what we left behind. 

Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no 
room in the train. The famous and now classic refrain, 
"Faut pas s'en faire" l floats about and makes one think 
how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn 
patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to 
virtues, the French seem to have all those we thought 
they had, in addition to others we never suspected them 
of having. 

A man completely bent with grief follows two men 
carrying a coffin. He himself carries a huge bead 
wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his sorrow, 
it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, 
which I thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals 
that which it receives. 

Dombasle, with its busy station and its great muni- 
tions-factories. Columns of smoke, from purest white to 
darkest brown, were rising to the shining heavens, and 
women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were 
going to work in the factories. 

At Rosieres immense camouflage works, and then the 
railway skirts the great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, 
very young girl is drawing a huge canal-boat. Her 
arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the 
broad band by which she tows that behemoth, a 

1,1 Faut pas s'en faire" is one of the most famous phrases of the 
French army, and has been described as a combination of two slang ex- 
pressions, "To keep your hair on, de ne pas se faire des cheveux," and 
"not to hurt your digestion by undue worry, de ne pas se faire de la bile." 

175 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

thousand times her size. In accord with some law of 
matter it is just possible. One thinks of the building 
of the Pyramids, and of the unborn. 

Nancy, 1.15. 

Lunching at the Cafe Stanislas and eating my fifth 
macaroon, "for remembrance." The gold guipure of 
the wrought-iron work makes the square seem to me 
like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a chal- 
lenge to memory. And I will not forget. 

Later. 

At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An 
old man attended to our luggage; he liked his tip and 
became talkative as he straightened our impedimenta in 
the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Ver- 
dun, the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames 
this summer. His toothless old mouth trembled, and I 
thought to myself in sudden horror, "God, is this 
France?" 

LlVERDUN, 3 o'clock. 

A vision of transfigured beauty in the afternoon light. 
Its high promontory aglow, every window a-dazzle. Its 
ancient walls, its old chateau, its church, all seemingly 
made of something pink, unsubstantial, shining. At the 
foot of the town flows the Moselle and there is a second 
shining moire ribbon — the great canal leading from the 
Marne to the Rhine. 

Toul. The gorgeous towers of the cathedral are 
a-shine, too, above the outline of the great barrack 
buildings. The vast station is a sea of blue-clad wash- 
ing in and out of trains. 

At Pagny we pick up the Meuse, la Meuse aux lignes 
nonchalantes. 

At Sorcy, wide, shallow expanses of inundation, and 
reeds and trees grow out of shining spaces, and meadow- 
bounded flat horizons stretch away, and suddenly it 

176 



ACROSS LORRAINE 

seems Oriental, Japanese, in the pink light — what 
you will — anything but a historic river of the European 
war, flowing through the elegant and sorrowful Lorraine. 

And then we find ourselves at Gondrecourt in the 
tip of the acute angle, for still, to go the straight road 
between Nancy and Chalons, we would have to pass 
Commercy, daily bombarded by big German guns. 

At Gondrecourt, about a dozen American soldiers 
standing on the platform, several seeming to have just 
left their mothers' knees. We wanted to speak to the 
nearest one, but feared we might represent l' autre danger. 
Great packing-boxes piled everywhere with "U. S. 
Army" stamped on them — and how fateful a destination 
is this little Lorraine town! 

At Demanges-aux-Eaux more Americans. An old 
church, quite mauve, rises up seemingly from bronze 
waters, the houses of the surrounding village, blue and 
gray. Americans are billeted in these wide-doored 
Lorraine peasant houses, or in big stables whose en- 
trances are high enough for great hay-wagons to pass 
through. 

A talkative military person in the compartment with 
us. I thought at first he was a secret agent, he seemed 
to know so little about the country; then I realized that 
he was only rather stupid. And he had an uncontrollable 
provincial curiosity about small things, and was quite 
intrigue" about his traveling companions, who seemed 
to know all the things he didn't know. He was en 
permission, coming from the forest of Parroy, the other 
side of Luneville, where the French and Germans sit 
within a few yards of each other. He was quite unin- 
teresting about it all, but it wasn't his fault, merely 
the way he was made. He showed me his map and 
the zigzagging German and French lines in the forest, 
and then I got suddenly bored and stood in the cor- 

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MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

ridor, and watched the Meuse get pink and then purple 
and then a strange glinting black. Down the streets of 
little villages would come blue-clad men, smoking and 
talking, or getting water and stores for evening meals. 
And then the sun disappeared behind the yellow poplars, 
and a cold, clear night began to fall. Bridges were 
guarded by sentries with bayoneted rifles, and old men 
and women and children came in from dim beet-root 
fields, and more khaki-clad Americans were standing 
about village streets, or cycling in the dusk, behind 
reeds in water, and there were deepening forests, and 
black ridges against the last pale lemon glow, and 
then another little town, Laneuville, and two American 
patrols marching up and down with rifle on shoulder. 

And the talkative officer, who had bought news- 
papers at Gondrecourt, tells of the pretty spy dancer, 
Mata Hari, shot that morning in the prison of Vincennes 
with warning pomp and circumstance, and of Bolo Pasha 
and V affaire Turmel, but as soon as he touches a subject 
it loses all vestige of human interest. 

" Ce que nous avons vu d' Anglais parterre d Combes," 
or, "Qu'il faisait froid la nuit ou nous cedions la ligne 
aux Anglais" or, "Je suis tou jours la ou on cede la ligne, 
they say now the Americans will take the line at Parroy." 

He has been through the whole war without a scratch 
— Verdun, the Somme, the Aisne — and now he spends 
cold, dark nights listening for Germans in the forest of 
Parroy, and it hasn't helped a bit; and he is one that 
will get through, when so much of wise and fair will 
have been gathered to the Lord. In an unwonted 
pause I asked him what he was in civil life, and he 
answered, "Fabricant de brosses d dent." I know it's all 
right, and there must be tooth-brushes, but we had just 
come from gallooned generals, prefects, mayors, smart 
young aviators, and men living in the world of books. 

178 



ACROSS LORRAINE 

Blue mists came up from the meadows and slipped 
between the hills, and everywhere black trees grew out 
of gold water. 

Ligny-en-Barrois. 

The end of our line at the north, and there is a Gothic 
church of the thirteenth century called Notre Dame des 
Vertus, and in it is the tomb of the Marechale de Luxem- 
bourg, dead in 1695. 

NANgOIS-TRONVlLLE. 

More blue meadow mists along gold waters, and soft 
dark fringes of willows. 

LONGEVILLE. 

The evening star and spirals of smoke from little 
houses, and blue-clad men melting into the twilight, 
and the canal a golden band, with stampings of deepest 
purple where tree shadows cut across it. Two American 
soldiers standing at a road-crossing looking up at the 
sign-post. Everywhere the Lorraine twilight is shot 
with khaki-colored threads from over the seas — and the 
three gray sisters spin the inexorable web. 

Bar-le-Duc, looking sick and sorry for itself. Station 
full of broken glass, dirt, and piles of demolished masonry. 
The evening star hangs above the older town on the hill. 
No time to get out to see how the canteen work is going 
on; but two obliging station employees gave me news. 
A whole quarter of the town by the river, near the Hotel 
du Commerce et de Metz, of unsanctified memory, was 
destroyed ten days ago, by an air raid. 

I asked if anything had happened to the church of 
St. -Peter, for I thought of the chef-d'oeuvre of Ligier Ri- 
chier, Rene de Chalons, 1 standing in its dim space, hold- 
ing his heart aloft in his left hand, eternal offering to his 

1 Rene" de CMlons, Prince of Orange, killed in 1544, at the siege of St.- 
Dizier. The genius of Ligier Richier has represented him according to 
his wish, as his body might have appeared three years after death. 

179 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

first wife, Louise of Lorraine. How his widow, Philippe 
de Gueldre, felt about this before she was laid out in 
the garb of the Poor Clares I don't know. 

No longer any night work in the canteen, no lights 
being permitted. Our train unlighted, too. New and 
larger signs indicating cellars and shelters everywhere. 
Black moving shapes of camions along the road, and the 
evening star following us along the top of the hill of 
Bar. A squad of Annamites quitting their work on the 
road. 

En ces armies singulieres 

Ou I'Annam casse des pierrcs 

Sur la route de Verdun. 

Revigny. 
Portentous dark shapes of roofless houses and detach- 
ments of blue-clad men going down a winding road, 
one with the blue twilight. The station dim, the town 
completely dark, and the vine-planted hills only soft 
masses; the evening star still following us, though she 
is so close to the ridge that in a few minutes she will 
drop behind it. Oh, this passing of the evening star in 
a war — autumn behind French hills! 

Vitry-le-Francois, $.45. 
Founded by Francois Premier near the old town which 
was burned with its church full of worshipers, in a fit of 
anger by Louis VII during his war with the Count of 
Champagne. To expiate this crime he undertook the 
Second Crusade. Much black ribbon of canal knotted 
about, one end of which leads from the heart of France 
to the Rhine. An endless train of troops going to the 
front, men pressed together, sardine- and herring-like, 
in each compartment — it made my soul sick — just hu- 
man masses weighed down by accoutrement and literally 
wedged in. A lively dispute between a thick-set poilu 

180 



ACROSS LORRAINE 

and one of the station employees on behalf of a slight, 
blond, very young soldier. 

"Quoi, vous osez engueuler un poilu de quinze ans?" 
And the following crescendo mounts to the broken 
panes of the station roof, "Embusque, cochon, salaud, 
vache!" 1 

There was no answer of protest from the official. 
And Vitry-le-Francois is where Napoleon almost took 
prisoner the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, 
and the Austrian General Schwarzenberg in 1814, and 
in 1 9 14 it was bombarded by the Germans, and now 
American troops pour through it. 

13 } Slacker, pig, dirty-one, cow! 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

H6tel de la Haute Mere Dieu, Chalons, October 17th, 1.30 a.m. 

LODGED at last with the "High Mother of God." 
' On arriving, dined in a low-ceilinged, dingy, dowdy 
room, but the acetylene lights, the uniforms and decora- 
tions of the officers, made something brilliant, which half 
veiled the knowledge of the dark night outside, the ap- 
proaching winter, the continuing war. 

Afterward, I slipped out with my little electric lamp, 
through the Place de la Republique, almost empty; low 
and splendid stars hung over the town. In the rue 
des Lombards, St.-Alpin was a dark mass, and from 
its tower the hour was striking a quarter to nine 
o'clock. 

I turned into the long, perfectly black rue de Marne. 
Not a single light, nor any passer-by. I flashed my lit- 
tle lamp to find the curb. There came a click of wooden- 
soled shoes from a side street, and a thick voice said, 
" Ah, la dame, pourquoi si vitef" I passed on like the 
wind, trembling, down the deserted street, but when I 
flashed the lamp to find another curb, something heavy 
and stumbling got nearer. And then I didn't dare to 
turn the light on, and I took the wrong turning, and 
found myself in what seemed a wilderness of mud and 
trees, with the click of those following wooden-soled 
feet behind, and any woman who has been terrified, 

182 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

she scarcely knows why, will understand. Finally I 
stopped behind a dark mass of trees, with something 
sucking about in the mud, and mumbling half -suspected 
words, and finally retreating. 

At that moment a soldier appeared, a gigantic shadow 
of himself as he struck a match to light his cigarette, 
and I asked: 

"Is this the rue du Port de Marne?" 

He answers, "You have missed your way; you are 
by the canal," and he puts me onto the road again, 
and then I turn and grope my way to the little house 
by the Marne. 

Neither Miss Nott nor Miss Mitchell is there, so I de- 
part again, going over the great Marne bridge to the 
station. Though I can see nothing, I hear the regu- 
lar practised tread of a marching squad, and when I 
flash my lamp to find the curb, a little detachment looms 
up unmeasurably big and distorted, and the horizon 
blue becomes that ghostly gray. 

In the canteen a thousand men at least. Am quite 
dazzled by the splendor of the installation. Warm wel- 
come from Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell, with the light 
of a very understandable pride in their eyes. Go be- 
hind the long counter, then through the kitchen to the 
little dressing-room; take off my hat, put on a long 
apron, twist my pale-blue chiffon scarf about my head 
and am ready. As I look out over the big room I 
feel that in the whole world it is the only place to be. 
Around me surged those blue waves; the light caught 
helmets and drinking-cups ; there was the mist of 
breath and smoke; the familiar sound of laughing, dis- 
puting, humming. That strange atmosphere of fatality 
hung over each and every one, yet with a merciless con- 
fusing of destinies in the extreme anonymity of it all. 

Came away at 11.30 enveloped in a strange sidereal 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

light, the stars still more splendid as the night deep- 
ened. Even the memory of tropical constellations 
vaulting high altitudes was dimmed. The Great Bear 
lay over the left of the Marne bridge, and on the other 
horizon, over the Promenade du Jard, where I suddenly 
remembered that St. -Bernard had preached the crusade 
in presence of Pope Eugene and Charles VII, was Orion, 
so bright that he alone could have lighted the town of 
the Catalaunian fields, and Jupiter seemed like a dis- 
tant sun, under the soft blur of the Pleiades. The river 
was mysterious, yet personal with its new mantle of 
history wrapping it sadly, yet tenderly, and with much 
glory. 

Then I was again in the still, dark, long street; no 
passers-by, no lights from any window, the clock of 
St.-Alpin striking midnight, and Orion concealed to 
his belt by the houses of the Place de la Republique. 
There wa's some deep stirring of my heart as I turned in 
at the door of La Haute Mere Dieu, leaving the gor- 
geous heavens to stretch over the wide plain of Chalons, 
where the hosts of Attila were defeated, where the great, 
misty, tragic, glorious history of Champagne and Lor- 
raine rolls itself out. Now above it all is the whir of 
aeros de chasse, and a faint, very faint booming of can- 
non. The Chalons plain continues to give me the 
"creeps." It is haunting and suggestive in the same 
way that the Roman Campagna is haunting and sug- 
gestive, though the great bare stretch, with its bald, 
chalky scarrings, its dull spots of pine woods, its dust 
or mud, has none of the material beauty of the Cam- 
pagna. Doubtless I'm within the folds of the mantle 
of the concentrated, continuous human passions that 
cover it. 

I trod as lightly as I could through a resounding 
corridor, having a profound regard for all sleeping things, 

184 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

past many leather leggings and spurred boots outside of 
silent doors. 

When I left the canteen, the guard, in answer to my 
cry, "Sentinelle!" said, as he opened the gate, "Ce rCest 
pas comme a Verdun, ou Von ne passe pas"; and then, 
"Bonsoir, Mees." It was so easily and gracefully said 
in the inimitable French way. 

October 17th, 7.30 a.m. 

Tea, a lukewarm pale-gray beverage, with some still 
crisp leaves afloat on the top. I would have been un- 
grateful if I had not thought of the Hotel des Vosges. 
Mrs. Church, fresh and strong as the morning, though 
just back from night shift, boiled some water for me 
and I blessed her. The bleakness of this room is in- 
describable. Two lithographs of the "Angelus" and 
"Les Glaneurs" but add to the desolation. A red-and- 
yellow striped paper on the walls; on the floor a worn 
square of Brussels carpet; brown woolen curtains; 
shutters with slats askew; a large mahogany chest of 
drawers; a grayish dimity cover to the feather bed, 
with machine-stitched motifs showing its ugly yellow 
case underneath; linen sheets, large, thick, and clean — 
and you have almost any room of La Haute Mere Dieu. 
Except Mrs. C.'s with its extraordinary bed, painted 
cream-color, having large "Empirish" corners formed 
by pale green and gilt Egyptian unduly voluptuous 
Sphinx-like figures, and a brownish-red plush baldaquin 
from which depend some yellowish-brown curtains; the 
brown carpet with purplish flowers is a protest between 
the two, and the rest of the room a riot of gilt mirrors. 
It's a room one couldn't forget, and why provincial 
hotels cling so to brown upholstery I don't know. They 
give the effect of being old and dirty even when they 
are — perhaps — new. 

The corridor has been a sounding-board sinGe dawn, 

185 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

and all during the night camions were being driven over 
the cobblestones, and motor horns rent the darkness. 
My room looks out over an old garden. A tall, dead 
tree-trunk has immemorial ivy clinging to it, and there 
is an old round well, half covered, and beyond the gate, 
with ivy and moss-grown urns, is a street that would 
have been quiet except for the camions; and I can see 
a row of distinguished-looking, plain-f acaded gray houses 
of another century, opposite. 

The German General Staff was lodged here before the 
battle of the Marne, the chambermaid told me, with a 
reminiscential gleam in her eyes. 

But you see how any one's personal history, his little 
wants, his little habits, are ground out into something 
quite different by the war-machine. The only thing 
any one asks is strength to get through what he has to 
do. He doesn't demand to get through in any special 
way — just get through — where so many don't. Not to 
be so cold that you can't use your hands or your mind, 
not to be so tired that you can't stand, not to be so 
hungry that you are faint and useless, not to go without 
sleep till you don't care what happens to anybody, 
especially yourself. Life is fairly simple, and somehow 
very satisfactory, on such a basis. 

11.30 p.m. 

A long day, with the exception of luncheon at the 
house on the Marne and a talk in the garden, where 
Mrs. Corbin and I sat for a while under the yellow 
chestnut-tree, looking out on the brimming, jade-colored, 
slow-flowing Marne, talking of destinies, and the illu- 
sion of free will, by which, however, all these high deeds 
which we witness are done. And it seems to me the 
thing called Destiny resides somewhere. It isn't a pure- 
ly subjective affair, created out of the combination of 
qualities and opportunities of each, rather something 

186 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

definite and operative and immutable; but that may 
only be the way I feel about it now. I am overcome 
all the time by the relativity of everything, even of 
truth. 

The little white birch- tree has no leaves, the butter- 
flies are gone, and winter is close upon the war-world. 
The gardener has been returned to his home. What 
of his sons, I wonder? He has a tender heart. 

Miss Stanton lives in the little yellow room with the 
niche and the emanations. Now she looks out on yel- 
lowing trees; yellow pumpkins lie in the little wet 
garden ; there is a border of yellow and red nasturtiums 
and dahlias. It's all like some stage-setting. When I 
said to her, "I hear you have the little room with the 
emanations," she answered, "There must be something 
about it ; for in spite of the fact that I am not comfort- 
able, I don't dislike it." 

I wondered again what soul had inhabited within 
those four walls and if the niche had been an altar, 
and to what god, as I walked along in a sudden cold 
mist that began to envelope Chalons. 

Since 10 o'clock. 

I have been swept about by varying tides of blue- 
clad men. Some thought the cantine epatante, others 
thought sadly and remarked loudly that so much money 
being spent on an installation meant that the war was 
going to last indefinitely. "C'est trop long," one thin, 
blond man, with deep-set eyes and bright spots on his 
cheeks, kept repeating, till one of his friends in unrepeat- 
able poilu terms told him to "leave the camp." 

Concert in the afternoon, the usual number of ex- 
tremely good diseurs. In the Salle de Recreation, where 
it was held, are reclining-chairs and writing-tables. 
When I told one not very young poilu that there was 

187 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

such a heaven, he, too, answered, "Alors la guerre va 
durer longtemps, si Von fait tout cela pour ceux qui 
restent." 

Lieutenant Tonzin has converted those old railway 
sheds into something most artistic. The walls are 
painted cream with strips of pale blue ; conventionalized 
fruit-filled baskets and designs of flowery wreaths deco- 
rate them at intervals. The great roof has drapings 
of white muslin, and square, engarlanded shades make 
the light shine softly on the blue-clad men coming and 
going, coming and going. 

On the counter are small green bushes. One home- 
sick-eyed gardener poilu from Marseilles, having felt 
them, wondered what they would do if watered. "Les 
pauvres! Chez nous sont grands comme ga," and he 
raised his hand toward the roof. 

"Toi, grand serin," remarked his comrade; "tu vois 
tout tou jours dix fois grandeur naturelle." 

Whereupon they began the inevitable dispute. I 
heard the words " gueuleton" "qu y est-ce que fas au bee" 
and the Marseillais finally calling out, as they re- 
treated, that he thanked God he hadn't been born at 
Caen. 

All is so orderly and the jokes mostly relatable. Only 
when they are somewhat allumes do they get on the 
subject of the eternal feminine, and then the dots are 
put on the i's, regarding her role on the natural plane. 
But even then there is generally some copain to say, 
" Ferme ta gueule," or "Que veux-tu que les mees sochent 
de tout cela?" The legend being that the canteens are 
served almost exclusively by vestals. 

When holding out their "quarts," they often ask, 
longingly, ''Pas de cogneau; pas de gniole?" x When I 
answered once, "Pas de pinard 2 ici" the poilu cried 

1 Cognac. 2 wine. 

188 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

back, "Mais le 'whisk'! Vous en avez tou jours chez 
vous!" Another delicate Anglo-Saxon reference. 

Late, in between one of the train rushes, two men 
came in, violently disputing as they stood at the 
counter : 

"C'est une guerre diplomatique, je te dis, cochon, va." 

"Qu'est-ce que tu dis la, mot, je te dis, sale type, que c'est 
une guerre qui ne mine a rien!" 

"C'est la mime chose, nom de nom ae t'es 

bete, espece d'acrobate," etc., etc. 

Another comes in saying, loudly: 

"Cette sacree guerre, cette sacrie guerre! Qu'est-ce que 
cela me fait que je sois boche ou Frangais? Suis de Roubaix, 
moi, il me faut manger du pain sec le reste de mes jours 
— moi et ma femme et mes cinq enfants." 

When I gave him his cup of steaming jus (coffee), he 
poured into it, from his bidon, a few drops of gniole, and 
by the time he got to the door he was singing the well- 
known refrain: 

Je fus vaccine, 

Inocule, 
Quatr' fois pique . . . 

Then a train arrived, the great room was flooded 
again, and no time for anything except to ask, " Avez- 
vous voire quart?" (the tin cup) our bowls having given out 
during the rush; or, "Prenez voire billet a la caisse," or, in 
order to relieve the congestion at la caisse, one takes 
their ten centimes and pours and pours and pours, or 
indicates the end of the counter, where the repas complet, 
consisting of soup, meat, vegetable, and salad, is served. 
Boudin with potatoes (a hundred yards of this dark 
"blood-sausage," curled up in boxes before being cooked, 
is an awful sight), or hash with potatoes, they love, but 
one and all hate macaroni with a deep hatred. Some- 

189 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

times it is served when the potatoes give out, and they 
don't conceal their distaste. They get too much cold 
macaroni in the trenches. 

It's always the ones who speak English who have the 
worst manners. One rather nice-looking individual 
came up to the repas complet counter, saying: "I'm in 
a 'urry . Got no waiters ? Step live' . ' ' No wwcorrupted 
Frenchman, even half-seas over, would dream of such 
a form of address! 

Lots of tiny, yellow Annamites in to-day, sounding just 
the way they look and looking just the way they sound. 
One brought back his salad-plate (accidents will happen 
in the best canteens) with a little worm a-move upon its 
edge, and he made some unintelligible sounds. When 
I thoughtlessly asked a poilu what he was saying, the 
poilu, quite unembarrassed, proceeded to tell me, but 
/ can't tell you! It must go no further. 

Lunched at the house by the Marne, where we talk 
American politics for a change, then back. One goes, 
one returns, and still they flood the vast room, and one 
continues the book of the cantine, bound in its horizon 
blue, with its blood-stained, tear-sealed pages. 

A quite peculiar warming of the heart when one's own 
khaki-clad men come in. Early in the afternoon an 
American appeared at the counter, accompanied by a 
French corporal. He had completely forgotten the 
name of his town, was driving a camion, and said, with 
a distressed air, "If I could only find a certain spot in 
town, I could get back"; and then added, with a grin, 
"I suppose you think I'm like the doctor that could 
cure fits; but I've got to get the fits before I can do 
anything else, and I'm late already," he finished, anx- 
iously. After giving various descriptions of various 
localities I hit on the Place de la Republique, "with a 
fountain with three women?" and as I explained to the 

190 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

under-officer, he said, "You've saved little Willie's 
life," and hurried out. 

The names seem the difficult part. One of them, 
when I asked where he was billeted, said : 

"That's one on me; it's got three names; but" — and 
he beckoned to a poilu standing near — "this is a pal of 
mine. When I give him three knocks on the shoulder 
he gives the name." 

The poilu didn't wait for even the first knock before 
he said, "Demanges-aux-Eaux," and then the American 
treated him to chocolate and offered him a "Lucky 
Strike" cigarette and began some exotic pronunciation 
of Demanges-aux-Eaux. 

There's always one special thing in every situation in 
life that comes hard. Now I must confess that when- 
ever I have to take a damp, dark-brown cloth in my hand 
and mop up puddles of spilled chocolate and coffee from 
the tiled counter, I feel an invincible repugnance. To- 
day four Americans came in together. A nice, tall, 
evidently perceptive one said, unexpectedly: 

"Just give me that rag." 

As I gratefully surrendered the clammy thing he 
continued : 

"I will be here all the afternoon and you'll find me 
mopping any time you like." He subsequently ordered 
four fried eggs apiece for himself and a poilu, and then 
took a whole box of the little sweet round biscuits that 
we were selling rather gingerly by twos and threes, came 
back from time to time for bowls of chocolate, when he 
would cheerfully mop the counter for me. Finally I said : 

"What is your name?" 

And he answered: "Smith. There're a few of us," 
he added, and then with a twinkle, "but I'm John. 
Now what do you say to a swap?" 

"I'm Mrs. O'Shaughnessy." 

191 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

"I bet I spot you. I was in Mexico last summer. 
Say, wasn't your husband mixed up with old Huerta?" 

I had to answer "yes" to this version of history. 

"I wasn't much on dust when I was down there, but 
there's too much water here. However," he continued, 
cheerfully, "we've got to tin the Teut or he'll tin us." 
Then he added, in a confidential voice: "What do you 
think of the war? I get mixed sometimes." 

I had noticed a small amethyst ring in the shape of 
a pansy on one of his large fingers as he was mopping, 
so, after disposing of his question in the briefest and 
most effective way by remarking that it was "up to 
us all" to do every bit we could to win the war, to 
which he agreed, I asked: 

"Are you engaged?" 

"To one beaut," he answered, without an instant's 
hesitation. "Met her in San Antonio last summer, 
but I guess she's the kind that waits. Gee! they were 
around her like flies, but I shoo'd 'em all off." 

And he pulled out the picture of a girl with large dark 
eyes half hidden in love-locks, and showing a lot of 
white teeth between pleasure-ready lips. What ap- 
peared of her person was clad in the most "peek-a- 
boo" of blouses, and there was a twist of white tulle 
about it all. I wondered if she was the "kind that 
waits." I had a sudden affection for John Smith, think- 
ing, however, as he passed out of the door, that his 
identification disk would be more definite than his 
name, and then, for an instant, I pondered on the 
supremely elemental thing he's come for. 

Damp, cold night had fallen on Chalons, but the 
canteen was warm and cheery, and the men who knew 
little of warmth and cheer were sitting about in a mo- 
ment's comfort, and there came to mind a canteen I 
know (oh, far away!) which is presided over by a lady 

192 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

with a mustache like a majordomo, and there are no 
night hours in her canteen. She rings an inexorable 
bell at the chaste hour of 9.30, and, rainy or dry, warm 
or cold, out they go, the poilus. Some one with a com- 
passionate heart remarked to one of the men on a pour- 
ing night, as the bell was ringing, "I am sorry you must 
go." He answered, with a glance at the ringer and a 
twist of his mustache: "It's well to choose them that 
way. It quiets us." And he went off singing, "Depuis 
le jour ou je me suis donnfe." It was too funny. . . . 

Friday, October 19th. 

A tightening of the heart at leaving that flooding 
hall — going out again to pick up the personal life, in- 
consequential as it now seems. One is hypnotized by 
the stream of humanity, drawn into its vortex, finally 
rushing along with it, who knows whence or whither. 
I jerked myself back by saying, "This is not my bit," 
and, "Each one to his own." There are many ways of 
helping win the war. 

I saw for a moment General Goigoux, just back from 
his permission, so solicitous for the welfare of his men, 
so pleased with the results of the canteen, smiling as he 
said to me: 

" Eh bien, Madame, cela a fait des progrds depuis voire 
dernikre visite." 

There is a quite wonderful entente, and appreciation, 
on both sides in Chalons. 

I went back into the canteen, and found some poilus 
in fits of laughter over a black cat. Now what a black 
cat evokes in the mind of the poilu I can only suspect; 
I don't quite know. Anyway, it's something that 
"makes to laugh"; and our black cat, strayed in weeks 
ago from who knows where, and perched near a de- 
voted lady of unmistakable respectability, lately ar- 

193 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

rived to help "save France," furthermore enveloped in a 
gray sweater (it's cold and draughty where she sits be- 
hind the small aperture selling tickets for coffee, choco- 
late, and repas complets), and not in her nature playful, 
seems somehow suggestive to the poilu. Even when it 
perches on the counter by the coffee-jugs it's the same. 
We don't like to get rid of it; it's supposed to bring 
good luck. However, enough, or perhaps too little, 
about the black cat. 

There is a surveillant supposed to keep order. He is 
rarely needed, and if he does say anything, he gets an 
"Embusque!" thrown at him, between the eyes. It's 
not the day of the civilian employee. This one spends 
a good deal of time eating and not paying, and nobody 
loves him. There is a favorite story of the poilu salut- 
ing a common or garden variety of policeman, thinking 
he was a corporal ; and when telling of his mistake after- 
ward he called it ll le plus malheureux jour de mavie" 

A hitch in the serving of the complete repasts. I 
looked into the kitchen to see if things couldn't be hur- 
ried up. The group that met my eyes, of the cook 
and her assistant wrestling with yards of blood-sausage, 
could have been the female pendant to the Laocoon. 
It was awful. As I turned back to the counter I heard 
this bit of conversation between two poilus waiting for 
their meal: 

"Tu sais, when a Canadian sees wood he goes wild. 
He'll chop up anything from a roadside cross to a baby- 
carriage. They say it is because of his forests. At 

last spring they took the balusters out of the house 

where they were quartered, and that pretty Jeanne 
you've heard about — un amour, je te dis — fell down in 
the dark and was killed." 

"Each one has his manie," answered his friend, in 
perfect tolerance. "Mais moi, je ne toucher ais pas a 

i94 



THE CHALONS CANTEEN 

une croix." And he proceeded to cross himself at the 
bare thought. 

A colonel whose name I don't remember took me into 
the garden to see the kiosks that I had so often indicated 
when the men asked for pinard or tabac. The guignol 
that I had seen at the camouflage grounds in July was 
in place; beyond was the huge bomb-proof shelter built 
by German prisoners to contain 2,000 men in case of 
avion attack. We took a few steps into its black, moist 
intricacies. As I came up I found myself close to a 
group of some thirty German prisoners being marched 
past to work on a cement emplacement for a gun, the 
large P. G. 1 stamped on their backs, and wearing their 
small round caps with the red stripe, and any kind of 
clothes. I felt for a moment like an illustration for 
Caesar's Commentaries, or some sort of a Roman watch- 
ing northern prisoners being marched by. 

The officer who showed me about was one of the 
twenty-seven men who escaped from the Fort de Vaux, 
and had lost his only child on Hill 304. 

"I was wounded, and I'm not yet worth much, which 
is why I am here. My boy was only twenty-one — 
mais c'etait une personne faite — a leader of men. All, 
with those qualities, go; I am not alone, alas! in my 
doideur." 

And that is one of the beautiful things of this sorrow- 
ful epoch. Each thinks upon the others' grief. . . . 
And then I left it all. 

The jade-colored Marne is flat, eddyless, brimming 
over with its autumn rains, the reeds have disappeared, 
the trunks of the willows are hidden. Over the gray 
bridge flows, unabated, that other stream of war and 
life. Camions, ambulances, smart red-and-white-marked 
staff automobiles, soldiers in every conceivable state 

1 Prisonnier de Guerre. 
195 



MY LORRAINE JOURNAL 

of soul and body, "enduring their going hence even as 
their coming hither." English, Americans, Senegalese, 
Annamites — a dozen races swell this Gallic flood, and 
the Gray Sisters never so busy since the world began. 

Paris, January 7th, igi8. 

I am waiting to know from one of the most charming 
of the sons of Gaul, who has promised to be my inter- 
cessor before the powers that be, whether I am to go to 
my front — our front— now or not. If, as Amiel says, ' 'Etre 
pret, c'est partir" then I am already off. 



FINIS 



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